Component-based software development is an effective technique for tackling the increasing complexity of large-scale embedded software systems. After building a logical software model, the designer must make design decisions, including choosing a multi-threading strategy and assigning priorities to threads, to ensure that the final implementation on the target execution platform satisfies non-functional requirements. Code generators for software design tools produce functional code, but typically ignore concurrency and timing issues. In this paper, we describe techniques for real-time scheduling and design-space exploration and optimization, with the goal of helping the designer synthesize efficient real-time implementations from component-based software models. Experimental evaluation shows that our techniques yield high-quality implementations with reasonable running time of the optimization algorithm.