A Scalable Approach to Real-Time System Timing Applications

This chapter describes a real-time system performance analysis approach known as reservation-based analysis (RBA). The scalability of RBA is derived from an abstract (target-independent) representation of system software components, their timing and resource requirements and run-time scheduling policies. The RBA timing analysis framework provides an evolvable modeling solution that can be instigated in early stages of system design, long before the software and hardware components have been developed, and continually refined through successive stages of detailed design, implementation and testing. At each stage of refinement, the abstract model provides a set of best-case and worst-case timing ‘guarantees’ that will be delivered subject to a set of scheduling ‘obligations’ being met by the target system implementation. An abstract scheduling model, known as the rate-based execution model then provides an implementation reference model with which compliance will ensure that the imposed set of timing obligations will be met by the target system.