Designing Event-Controlled Continuous Processing Systems

Many embedded systems, such as systems in the process control and measurement domains, are designed to perform continuous processing of input values and to produce and maintain corresponding output values. At the same time these systems have to react on events that reconfigures the processing algorithms. This paper will present some of the results of a Danish research project entitled “Architecture of embedded systems” inside COT (Centre for Object Technology). More specifically the paper will present the results of an object-oriented analysis, design and partial implementation of a frequency converter. The paper will also present an outline of an architecture for this kind of system and describe how the combination of several Design Patterns (Gamma et. al.) have been useful for building an object-oriented architectural model described with UML notation. The results presented will be relevant for most event-controlled continuous processing systems.