Documentation and Tools to Support Worst Case Execution Time Analysis

Abstract

<p>Knowing the timing behavior is essential when designing and inspecting real-time systems. Especially, the Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) of a program is of the utmost importance for schedulability and other timing analyses. The industrial deployment of critical systems presents an urgent need for WCET analysis methods and tools.</p> <p>This thesis represents how the Display documentation method, introduced by Parnas and his colleagues in [32], is extended and used to aid WCET analysis and WCET Tool development. The work is performed within a Reverse Engineering Project, which has to recover high-level requirements of IBM 1800 assembler applications. Specifically, the displays are (primarily) manually composed from code, and then used by timing analysts for program understanding and flow analysis, which are essential phases in timing analysis. The thesis combines the Display documentation method with the WCET analysis techniques to solve several general problems in determining the upper bound of program execution time. It also includes a detailed example of a WCET, analysis tool based on the documentation method.</p>