Interactive multimedia application design involves many complicated issues like media synchronization, presentation scheduling, determination of quality of service (QOS) requirements, user interactions and operational variations in the distributed real time environment. Development tools that allow programmers to model multimedia applications, to analyze their behaviors and to verify their correctness against specified requirements are highly desirable....[ Read more ]

Interactive multimedia application design involves many complicated issues like media synchronization, presentation scheduling, determination of quality of service (QOS) requirements, user interactions and operational variations in the distributed real time environment. Development tools that allow programmers to model multimedia applications, to analyze their behaviors and to verify their correctness against specified requirements are highly desirable.

In this research, we proposed and described an integrated development environment for modeling, analysis and execution of interactive multimedia applications. The development environment includes an application modeling tool, an analyzer and a supporting run-time system (SAMOCS2).

A new real-time concurrent specification model, called Extended Timed. Transition Model (ETTM), was introduced. ETTM is a continuous-time extension of the Timed Transition Model (TTM). An interactive multimedia application is modeled as a set of timed state transitions. Specification of requirements of multimedia applications using Real-Time Temporal Logic (RTTL) was studied.

We devised analysis methods to decide properties of a multimedia application. Enumerative analysis techniques used in Time Petri Nets were adopted to construct state class reachability graph from the application's ETTM specification. The state class reachability graph captures all possible behaviors of the application and was shown to be finite and bounded. Decision procedures were devised to verify any RTTL requirement formuIae and to obtain useful resource information.

An analyzer prststyge which includes construction of state class reachability graph and decision procedures was implemented and evaluated.

A detailed case study on the development of a multimedia application using the described modeling and analysis methods was performed. We concluded that the methods are powerful and useful for multimedia application development.