HRT-UML: Taking HRT-HOOD onto UML

In the niche market that the HOOD method addresses (notably aerospace and transport), its specialised derivative HRT-HOOD has, over the last few years, increasingly earned the reputation of being "the" answer to the demands from the development of time-critical systems.

From the methodological standpoint, therefore, it may certainly be argued that HRT-HOOD was a definite success story, yet hampered by the (commercially major) downside of lacking productive tool support.

The massive advent of UML presents the HRT-HOOD community with a threat and an opportunity: the threat that the irresistible thrust of the new trend obliterate the methodological value of the old; the opportunity of riding the UML wave, with its large offer of support technology, while trying to preserve the unique strengths of HRT-HOOD.

The latter perception motivated a project recently funded by ASI, the Italian Space Agency, which produced the definition of a new, UML-based method, named HRT-UML.

The full paper that will follow the submitted extended abstract discusses the technical and methodological choices that the project made in devising the strategy for bringing together the best of both worlds: HRT-HOOD, as the outgoing method; and UML, as the linguistic infrastructure on which domain-specific methods and processes can be instantiated.

The paper also positions HRT-UML with respect to the on-going efforts for extending UML to the real-time domain.

Finally, which should be of major interest to the Ada community, this paper presents its strategic choice to view the Ada Ravenscar Profile as the target language for the automated code generation capability attached to the method.