• embedded systems
• hierarchical systems
• operating systems
• real time
• resource reservation
• resource sharing

This thesis consists in the implementation of a hierarchical scheduling framework, a paradigm that allows the coexistence of a number of separate applications in the same processor.
In this work new approaches to implement kernel mechanisms for hierarchical scheduling are presented, considering also resource sharing among applications.
This new kind of methodology allows to support directly at operating system level the component based development, a new software design approach for embedded systems where subsystems are independently developed and successively integrated, in order to compose the complete system.
The presented mechanisms have been implemented in VxWorks 6.9, a commercial real-time operating system developed by WindRiver that is widely adopted for safety-critical applications.