Framework for Real-time Embedded Systems based on COntRacts
FRESCOR is a consortium research project funded in part by the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme (FP6/2005/IST/5-034026 ).
The main objective of the project is to develop the enabling technology and infrastructure required to effectively use the most advanced techniques developed for real-time applications with flexible scheduling requirements, in embedded systems design methodologies and tools, providing the necessary elements to target reconfigurable processing modules and reconfigurable distributed architectures.
The approach to achieve this main objective is to integrate advanced flexible scheduling techniques directly into an embedded systems design methodology, covering all the levels involved in the implementation, from the OS primitives, through the middleware, up to the application level. This will be achieved by creating a contract model that specifies which are the application requirements with respect to the flexible use of the processing resources in the system, and also what are the resources that must be guaranteed if the component is to be installed into the system, and how the system can distribute any spare capacity that it has, to achieve the highest usage of the available resources.
This contract-based methodology requires, for each resource, an underlying implementation that is capable of enforcing the reservations implied by the different active contracts. The contracts will be integrated with a component-based framework, and will provide the required level of abstraction to make the component model independent of the underlying implementation and hardware architecture. The framework will be portable across different scheduling strategies and platforms. Because of the dynamic nature of the contracts and the independence that they provide among the different real-time components of the application, the methodology is well suited to address very dynamic systems, such as those based on reconfigurable architectures.
This project was part of the portfolio of the Embedded Systems Unit – G3 Directorate General Information Society. For more information please check the CORDIS project record.
