Comparison of Component Frameworks for Real-Time Embedded Systems Petr Hoˇ sek 1 ,Tom´aˇ s Pop 1 ,Tom´aˇ s Bureˇ s 1,2 , Petr Hnˇ etynka 1 , and Michal Malohlava 1 1 Department of Software Engineering Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Malostranske namesti 25, Prague 1, 118 00, Czech Republic 2 Institute of Computer Science, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Pod Vodarenskou vezi 2, Prague 8, 182 07, Czech Republic {hosek,pop,bures,hnetynka,malohlava}@dsrg.mff.cuni.cz Abstract. The usage of components brings significant help in develop- ment of real-time embedded systems. There have been a number of com- ponent frameworks developed for this purpose and some of them have already become well-established in this area. However, although the com- ponent frameworks share basic concepts and the general approach, they substantially differ in the range of supported features and maturity. This makes relatively difficult to select the right component framework and thus poses a significant obstacle in adoption of the component-based de- velopment for real-time embedded systems. To provide an overview, we present a survey in this paper, which illustrates distinguishing features of selected modern component-based frameworks for real-time embedded systems. The survey identifies features which are important for building systems from components in this area and compares these frameworks with respect to these features. 1 Introduction With growing complexity of embedded systems and with the increasing stress on mass production and customization, component-based software engineering is becoming increasingly important in this area. This is testified by growing number of component systems aiming at different application domains of embedded sys- tems (be it AUTOSAR [5] in automotive industry, ROBOCOP [14] in consumer electronics, and emerging standards for component based systems engineering in space industry – as recently demanded by ESA 1 SAVOIR initiative). Many years for which the components have been researched have however shown that a proper construction of a component system is not an easy task and 1 http://www.esa.int/ L. Grunske, R. Reussner, and F. Plasil (Eds.): CBSE 2010, LNCS 6092, pp. 21–36, 2010. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010