Courseware: Real-time and Ada 95

[bsanden@site.gmu.edu (Bo I. Sanden)]

A course in real-time software design based on Ada 95.
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A course in real-time software design based on Ada 95 is freely available 
as asset_a_825 from the Asset repository (www.asset.com).

The material forms a semester-long graduate course. It has also been 
used for concentrated courses of 3-5 days and 1-day tutorials. 

The course starts with an overview of the Ada 95 syntax for tasks and 
protected units. The rest of the material shows how to design concurrent 
software. The emphasis is on practical, real-time applications. The 
examples go far beyond those textbook examples commonly used to illustrate 
syntactical features and issues such as mutual exclusion and deadlock. 
Examples include: Automobile cruise control, Buoy problem, Home-heating 
problem, Remote temperature sensor, Airport luggage handling, LEGO car 
factory, Elevator control problem and Flexible manufacturing system. 
(Some of these are well-known from the literature, others are new.)

While the course surveys other design approaches, the main theme is
entity-life modeling (ELM). ELM is not a cookbook method but rather a 
principle relating the structure of the software to the structure of 
the problem itself. In order to use the course material, you do not have 
to commit to a particular series of design steps. The designs will 
appear quite intuitive. 


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Dr. Bo I. Sanden 
Colorado Technical University, Colorado Springs 
Email: bsanden@isse.gmu.edu 

Author of: Software Systems Construction with Examples in Ada,
Prentice-Hall 1994