Pitfalls and misconceptions in component-oriented approaches for real-time embedded systems: lessons learned and solutions

When the task befalls you to devise a novel component-oriented approach for real-time embedded systems you first dutifully undertake a thorough scrutiny of the import and pitfalls of previous attempts. This is what we have done for the last couple of years, in the context of an initiative promoted by the European Space Agency for the creation of a component model to serve the development of new-generation on-board software. In this paper we recapitulate the lessons we learned in that effort.