Some timing aspects of software development for reactive systems: The two-axis paradigm
Abstract This article is about specification of timing at each step in the software development cycle. It examines how to express timing constraints along two main abstract axes. The first axis is the development steps; timing constraints at the specification level are not asserted in the same way as timing constraints at the design or implementation level because of validation. The second axis is the multilevel control architecture, in which timing constraints are harder at the lower levels; at this point it is necessary to introduce a timing abstraction to make time calculus effective at all levels. In this context, we propose a temporal language, Zaman, to express timing constraints and deepen the two-axis paradigm for timing constraint expression. This work seeks to open new research directions in the field of timing specification and validation of reactive systems and gives a preliminary basis for further study.