Formal Analysis of Processor Timing Models

Hard real-time systems need methods to determine upper bounds for their execution times, usually called worst-case execution times. This talk gives an introduction into state-of-art Timing-Analysis methods. These use Abstract Interpretation to predict the system’s behavior on the underlying processor’s components and Integer Linear Programming to determine a worst-case path through the program. The abstract interpretation is based on an abstract processor model that is conservative with respect to the timing behavior of the concrete processor. Ongoing work is reported to analyze abstract processor models for properties that have a strong influence on the expected precision of timing prediction and also on the architecture of the timing-analysis tool. Some of the properties we are interested in can be model checked.