An Architectural Perspective of Real-Time Ada Applications

While there are appear to be many ways in which real-time Ada systems can be designed, it is observed that they can be described using four architectural families: the Timeline, Event-Driven, Pipeline, and Client-Server architectures. This paper describes the principal characteristics of each of these architecture families with respect to their ability to provide bounded application response times, their cost, and safety at a high level. In addition, the use of important Ada constructs for each architecture family is discussed, and examples of application domains that use each of these architectures are identified.