Interface-based design of real-time systems

Today most embedded systems consist of a collection of computation and communication components that are supplied by different vendors and assembled by a system manufacturer. Such a component-based design methodology is followed in several domains such as automotive, avionics, and consumer electronics. The system manufacturer responsible for component assembly has to take design decisions (related to the choice of components and how they are to be connected, e.g. using a bus or a network-on-chip) and perform system analysis. Such important analysis is usually related to verifying that buffers in components never overflow or underflow, end-to-end delays or worst-case traversal times (WCTTs) of data through a component network fall within given deadlines, and others.