Douglass devotes 13 chapters and three appendices to the subject of real-time and embedded systems developed with UML and a risk-based development life cycle called ROPES. Each chapter contains sections on concepts, a summary, a discussion of the context of its subject in the development cycle, exercises, and references. The book is directed at professional software engineers and suitably experienced students.

The book is divided into five parts. The first part is a four-chapter introduction that describes UML, real-time systems, safety and criticality, and development processes. Chapter 1 introduces UML, starting with the concepts of objects, classes, and relations. It extends this basis to more advanced concepts such as use cases, packages, and deployment models. In the second chapter, real-time issues are presented in terms of time response, concurrency, predictability, and correctness. The material is reinforced by the underlying study of scheduling and concurrency. The third chapter considers the concepts of safety through fault tolerance and the identification of fail-safe states and safety techniques. Chapter 4 discusses development using a rapid object-oriented process (ROPES) to identify deliverables and risks that can be reduced through the use of ROPES in the development of the system.

Part 2 consists of three chapters that consider analysis and requirements capture based on use cases, scenarios, state machines, and the processes of abstraction and model behavior. The fifth chapter describes the application of use cases and scenarios for requirements capture, which is an effective method of revealing the external behavior of a system. The author demonstrates a number of techniques that can be applied to the situation. In chapter 6, use cases are developed to realize object models and collaboration. Techniques for performing structural object analysis by identifying and refining objects are presented. Chapter 7 reviews finite state machines, UML state charts, and activity diagrams for refining object definitions.

Part 3 (three chapters) defines design in terms of concurrency, real-time artifacts, mapping to physical architecture, design patterns for minimum collaboration of objects, and modeling algorithms. In chapter 8, top-level architectural design is described in terms of four models. The first is a tasking model for packaging objects into independent execution threads and strategies for managing and synchronizing threads. The component model packages generated objects into libraries of executables, databases, files, and so on. The deployment model develops ways to map the system onto the hardware and to manage collaboration between the objects. The safety/reliability model reviews component and development models for safety and reliability. Chapter 9 covers the intermediate level, mechanistic design, which ensures that objects and classes collaborate to achieve common goals by applying real-time patterns such as those for correctness and execution. Detailed design is considered in chapter 10.

The fourth part (three chapters) describes topics that are particularly associated with real-time and embedded systems. It considers mathematical models of scheduling, circumstances for using state machines, and the structure and function of real-time frameworks. Chapter 11 discusses schedulability in terms of action utilities, scheduling, thread synchronization, and resource management primitives. Patterns are described as general solutions to problems for standard classes, objects, components, and packages. The twelfth chapter introduces dynamic modeling as behavior patterns through states, actions, and transitions. Examples demonstrate standard problems, solutions, and consequences. The chapter ends with a consideration of model-level debugging and testing. In chapter 13, the concept of real-time frameworks is developed as a library of objects and operations. The environments considered are communications protocols and a distribution algorithm.

Part 5 consists of appendices describing UML and two design and implementation tools.