Time-triggered Communication for Distributed Control Applications in a Timed Computation Model

Distributed real-time control applications consist of sets of tasks that interact with the physical world through sensors and actuators and are executed on a dispersed set of locations that are interconnected by a communication subsystem. Timeliness and safety requirements of the application demand deterministic execution of tasks and predictive communication. Deterministic and predictable systems can be build, and if upper bounds for processing and communication latencies are known and event arrivals have deterministic distributions. In this paper we describe the timing definition language (TDL) system architecture implementing time-triggered computation and time-triggered communication. The TDL system implements the timed computation model and its architecture consists of two parts: TDL-Exe (for time and value deterministic execution of tasks) and TDL-Com (for predictive communication of values). The paper presents TDL-Exe and describes implementation details of TDL-Com.