Real-time support

Real-time features in FCM can be specified via the OMG specification MARTE. A UML profile for MARTE is available for the open source UML tool Papyrus.
Real-time properties in eC3M can be specied for containers and connectors. The options that are available depend on the chosen container and connector types. Currently, one connector offers real-time properties that have first been introduced by an approach called ACCORD. ACCORD has been developed a couple of years ago as an object oriented platform dedicated to real-time applications. It offers the following properties on interactions:

A caller adds additional information to a request which influences its execution behavior. This information is called real-time feature (RTF) and comprises a deadline, a ready-time (both in relative to a reference time) and optionally a period length if this request should be executed periodically. The deadline is used by an EDF (earliest deadline first) scheduler.
Operations are tagged with the information whether they are parallelizable and whether they can modify the state of an object or not. The latter is used by an n-reader 1-writer locking scheme to avoid inconsistent states.

In the context of the UML profile MARTE the stereotype «RT-UNIT» allows to specify real-time objects. More informations (and examples) how to specify real-time behaviour will be available soon (target March 2009).