Engineers at the TRW Space and Technology Division in Redondo Beach, Calif., needed a design and development tool for software testing that enabled them to perform system tradeoff without committing to a design. They found their answer in the PERTS 2.3 prototyping environment from Tri-Pacific Software Corp. in Alameda, Calif.
"With the design tradeoff we don`t have to write code or build boards. It`s a very easy-to-use tool," says Candice Uhlir, a TRW spokeswoman.
"Tri-Pacific accomplished the trade-off by using a mathematical theory developed at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana," says Uhlir. The theory is called rate monotonic analysis - a quantitative methodology that tests task scheduling in real time under worst-case scenarios.
PERTS enables designers to analyze, validate, and evaluate real-time systems, and experiment with alternative scheduling and resource-management strategies. Users can analyze any stage of the product life-cycle to determine the best analysis.
In addition to rate monotonic algorithms, several other scheduling protocols are available, including Deadline Monotonic scheduling algorithms, Priority Ceiling Protocol, and Stack Based Protocol priority-assignment algorithms. - J.M.
For more information, contact Tri-Pacific by phone at 510-814-1770, by mail at 1070 Marina Village Parkway, Alameda, Calif., 94501, or on the World Wide Web at http://www.tripac.com.
