Contents I. Introduction
Recent research in real-time systems has focused on designing frameworks for enabling component-based design in realtime systems. State-of-the-art frameworks for compositional real-time systems include [1], [7], [11], [20]. Component-based design is highly desirable due to its well-known benefits of reducing overall system complexity and enhancing system designers' understanding of the system. One of the major benefits of these systems is achieved by the goal of component abstraction, which hides the internal complexity and details of one component from developers of other components and only exposes information necessary to use the component via an interface. In most compositional frameworks, a component uses a real-time interface to communicate with the other components of the system. A component specifies its resource requirements to meet its real-time constraints by the attribute interface bandwidth. Thus, an important design issue of these compositional frameworks is addressing the problem minimization of interface bandwidth (MIB-RT).
