[icegreentea2]

There are a few layers to your question.

If you mean distributed to mean "over multiple computers", then ya... this is a really specialized field. Your ability to synchronize and maintain hard real-timeness between computers is completely dependent on IO and hardware features, and topology. This makes it much harder to make a generalized framework.

We we ignore the distributed portion, then you're describing a real-time operating system - in which case something like https://www.freertos.org/ might fit the bill?

[numpad0]

I mean realtime inter-node message passing in a tree topology network, with message frequency associated to edges, like shown in [1]. Each nodes might run on its own CPU clocks, but message exchanges occur realtime, progressively faster at each depth, and the system as a whole(what "Autonomous System" probably supposed to mean) runs as a slow but coherent realtime cluster.

Perhaps the idea that message passing has to happen realtime is something obvious or elementary to military/defense/aerospace from technical requirements or experiences fighting fog of war etc., but to me it was dumbfounding new and I guess it might also be for the general public?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:4D-RCS_reference_model_ar...