The worst-case execution-time problem—overview of methods and survey of tools

  • Authors:
  • Reinhard Wilhelm;Jakob Engblom;Andreas Ermedahl;Niklas Holsti;Stephan Thesing;David Whalley;Guillem Bernat;Christian Ferdinand;Reinhold Heckmann;Tulika Mitra;Frank Mueller;Isabelle Puaut;Peter Puschner;Jan Staschulat;Per Stenström

  • Affiliations:
  • Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany;Virtutech AB, Stockholm;Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden;Tidorum Ltd., Helsinki, Finland;Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany;Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL;Rapita Systems, Ltd.;AbsInt Angewandte Informatik;AbsInt Angewandte Informatik;National University of Singapore;North Carolina State University;IRISA;Tu Vienna;TU Braunschweig;Chalmers University of Technology

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The determination of upper bounds on execution times, commonly called worst-case execution times (WCETs), is a necessary step in the development and validation process for hard real-time systems. This problem is hard if the underlying processor architecture has components, such as caches, pipelines, branch prediction, and other speculative components. This article describes different approaches to this problem and surveys several commercially available tools1 and research prototypes.