Object oriented approach seems natural for real-time control systems that typically consist of sensors and actuators entities and control entities between these. Reusability and maintainability are, among others, positive attributes of object-oriented approach, because of their capability of abstraction, information hiding and inheritance. But, there are some drawbacks too: from specification level point of view, specifying the transformation of the system entities, with which timing constrains, should be associated lacks in means of expressing specific real-time aspects. This paper investigates which are the relevant aspects that should be considered when applying object-oriented issues to real-time systems development, emphasizing the improvements needed for specifying object behavior in a real-time control system. The identified concepts were illustrated using a simple and practical example.
Real-time control systems, object oriented decomposition methodologies, object states.
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