Abstract
Several real-time software specification languages and techniques exist in industry and academia. This paper compares and evaluates some of these real-time specification techniques using a common framework. The qualitative evaluation of these languages demonstrates that most of these languages have several aspects that are preventing these languages from being accepted and adopted at a broader scale. A discussion on the aspects among these real-time languages is presented and commonalities of aspects across the languages are highlighted. The paper also provides recommendations on how these aspects should be enhanced in a next generation real-time specification language.