Book Image

The Complete Edition - Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems

By : Jim Cooling
Book Image

The Complete Edition - Software Engineering for Real-Time Systems

By: Jim Cooling

Overview of this book

From air traffic control systems to network multimedia systems, real-time systems are everywhere. The correctness of the real-time system depends on the physical instant and the logical results of the computations. This book provides an elaborate introduction to software engineering for real-time systems, including a range of activities and methods required to produce a great real-time system. The book kicks off by describing real-time systems, their applications, and their impact on software design. You will learn the concepts of software and program design, as well as the different types of programming, software errors, and software life cycles, and how a multitasking structure benefits a system design. Moving ahead, you will learn why diagrams and diagramming plays a critical role in the software development process. You will practice documenting code-related work using Unified Modeling Language (UML), and analyze and test source code in both host and target systems to understand why performance is a key design-driver in applications. Next, you will develop a design strategy to overcome critical and fault-tolerant systems, and learn the importance of documentation in system design. By the end of this book, you will have sound knowledge and skills for developing real-time embedded systems.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Preface
15
Glossary of terms

12. Mission-Critical and Safety-Critical Systems

First, a simple question: should you bother to spend time reading this chapter (I'm sure there are many more exciting things to do)? Well, to answer that, ask yourself another simple, but very important, question. If your system misbehaves, what are the resulting consequences? User irritation, loss of work, loss of money, damage to equipment, injury to people, or death? These are just some possible outcomes. So, where is your system on this scale of things? Moreover, apart from the moral issues, what are the legal and financial consequences of such problems?

The purpose of this chapter is to help you to develop a design strategy for critical systems. It does this by doing the following:

  • Explaining the meaning of critical and fault-tolerant systems
  • Illustrating how systems may be classified in terms of the consequences of their failures
  • Showing the relationship between failure severity levels, failure probabilities...