Reusable Method for Behavioural Regulation of Executing Real-time Embedded Systems

Sammanfattning: Traditionally, real-time applications have been executed within an isolatedembedded system, but this is becoming outdated. These systems are growing andbecoming larger, more distributed and complex, and are often closely integratedwith the external structure. The ability to dynamically adapt and regulate thesesort of systems during runtime is an increasingly desired feature. It can increaseits lifespan and save costs in the form of both money and time. This thesisproposes a method to perform this dynamic adaptation and regulation with theconcept of computational reflection. The method is conformed to support theconstrained and varied environment faced when working with distributedembedded real-time systems. A prototype framework of the method has beenrealized in the programming language C++. This framework is lightweight anduses a minimum amount of dependencies. By including this framework into anexisting program and registering variables into the framework, the variables gainreflective properties. These properties are dynamic regulation and limited selfawareness.Lastly, the framework has been evaluated regarding its computationalload and memory consumption. This, in order to show how much extra strainthis sort of method would inflict on an existing system. The results show that,relative the functionality it provides, the strain is low in most of the cases.However, in a hard real-time environment this might not be a viable solution.