DARTSVIEW, A TOOLKIT FOR DARTS IN LABVIEW

Abstract

DARTS (Design Approach for Real Time Systems) [4] is a software design method for real time systems. LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) is a graphical application development environment developed by National Instruments Corporation based on the dataflow representation of the "G" language [6][2]. LabVIEW is implicitly multithreaded and has high level functions for communication/synchronization, allowing it to be used as a programming language for control/command and soft real-time applications. In order to help a designer to develop a real-time application, we propose the library DARTSVIEW, which simplifies the passage from the conception of a "multitasking" application to the implementation [8). One can use DARTSVIEW in different phases of the life cycle of real-time system software. The last version of DARTSVIEW, allows to define in XML several real-time programming normalized languages, and to generate a part of the code for different specific programming languages (Ada, POSIX 1003.1, VxWorks, OSEK/VDX, etc.). The flexibility introduced by the use of XML allows a designer also to generate some code targeting real-time scheduling analysis tools in order to achieve the temporal validation. The objective of this article is to present an overview of DARTSVIEW, a Toolkit for DARTS in LabVIEW, the role of DARTSVIEW in the software.