TFbound

TFbound is an open-source framework designed to express, verify, and enforce time- and function-bound constraints in computational workflows. The system is built around the idea of bounding both when tasks run and what they achieve within a given process. It provides a form of temporal and functional governance over complex pipelines, enabling predictable performance in environments where timing guarantees are essential.

The architecture of TFbound comprises a front-end domain-specific language for declaring bounds, a constraint solver that checks feasibility and consistency, and a runtime scheduler that enacts the constraints on available resources. A monitoring layer records bound compliance and violations, supporting post-hoc analysis and refinement. The framework emphasizes interoperability, offering bindings for languages such as Python and C++, and integrating with common task runners and message-passing systems.

TFbound originated as a collaborative project by researchers and practitioners interested in real-time and safety-critical systems. It is maintained by an international community and released under an open-source license. The project emphasizes formal verification, practical deployment, and extensibility, with ongoing work to improve solver efficiency, support for stochastic bound analysis, and integration with existing timing-sensitive tooling.

Typical use cases include real-time robotics, streaming data analytics, and embedded systems where strict deadlines and functional dependencies must be respected. In practice, TFbound enables developers to specify bounds such as maximum end-to-end latency, per-stage processing times, and data-product guarantees, while the runtime ensures adherence under varying workload and resource conditions.