Criteria and an objective approach to selecting commercial real-time operating systems based on published information

Matching a commercial real-time operating system to a particular application is a problem for which there is no obvious solution strategy. Factors such as estimated production volume, likely processor involved, mission criticality, cost, reliability, software support, ease-of-use, and maintainability need to be considered, yet often the selection is based merely on the preferences of the design team or management, or the intensity of vendor marketing. This article examines the selection of real-time operating systems. A set of criteria and an associated metric are presented that rely only on published marketing information. To demonstrate the application of this metric, information from several existing commercial real-time operating systems is collected and analyzed. Five hypothetical applications are then matched with the most appropriate real-time operating system, using the criteria and metric. The contribution of this research is a set of criteria, a metric, and a methodology for matching real-time operating systems to applications based on marketing information, without the need for intensive performance testing.