Static and dynamic analysis of real-time systems

• Authors: Wael Elseaidy
• Venue: ACM-SE 30 Proceedings of the 30th annual Southeast regional conference
• Year: 1992

A study was performed on various real-time formal specification techniques. Based on this study a procedure was developed for static and dynamic analysis for real-time programs. This procedure is based on the real-time logic (RTL), Presburger arithmetic, and deterministic timing tools. The major idea is to use Presburger arithmetic as a way for analyzing and reasoning about the time properties of the specification. The main output of this analysis is what we refer to as specification upper and lower bounds (Spec U/L Bounds) for different actions in the program. These Spec U/L Bounds are then compared with the U/L bounds produced by deterministic timing tools, a step which can be viewed as specification-based testing). Also the Spec U/L bounds do not deal with the entire program but rather the parts of the program that may lead to violations of the program specification during implementation. This gives the advantage of testing the U/L bounds of some specific paths of the program, which in turn helps when dealing with the deterministic timing tools (one major disadvantage of the deterministic timing tool is dealing with many paths in the program which leads to a very loose U/L bounds). In short, this specification-based testing overcomes some problems one may face when dealing with deterministic timing tools for testing the timing properties of a given program.