Temporal Control in Real-Time Systems: Languages and Systems

Temporal control is an important concept for real-time systems, and several systems and languages provide means for setting temporal constrains on the program. However, the way temporal constraints are placed on the program, the granularity, and the supported kinds of temporal constraints differ from system to system. This chapter provides an introduction to temporal control in real-time systems on the basis of temporal constraints. First, it introduces the notion and nature of a temporal constraint and presents a generic model of the task life cycle. Second, it discusses six different systems and languages with temporal control by adapting the generic model to the individual system and by presenting a short example of a stopwatch task. Finally and third, a summary and discussion of the differences among these systems conclude the chapter.