Strategies for Real-Time System Specification

Chapter 7. Timing Requirements

Timing is one of the most critical aspects of modern real-time systems. Often, the system’s response must occur within milliseconds of a given input event, and every second it must respond to many such events in many different ways. Typically, the system is embedded in a vehicle or in a larger system, so size, processing capacity, and memory capacity are limited. Achieving these critical timing requirements under these constraints becomes very difficult, and is a major challenge for the designer.

Fortunately, the fact that the requirements model carefully separates requirements definition from design, as discussed in Chapter 3, means we, as requirements analysts, do not have to address the problems of how to achieve ...