Component-based Timing Analysis for Embedded Software Components in Cyber-Physical Systems

Real-time embedded systems are widely adopted in cyber-physical applications such as automotive, avionics and medical care. Reusable software components have been proven to be able to reduce the time and cost in designing those systems. Worst-case execution time (WCET) information of those components is one of the properties that are of the utmost importance concerning the safety of a system. How to reuse the WCET information of one component in the overall embedded system context is, however, far from straightforward. In this paper, we propose a hybrid timing analysis approach which facilitates the reuse of the timing property of a component. The approach is able (i) to decouple the timing analysis of a component independently from the rest of the system; (ii) to generate input data specifically for a component; (iii) to re-compose the execution time of the overall system on different granularity levels. We will illustrate the method and discuss its potential and the possible pitfalls.