Schedulability Analysis of MSC-based System Models
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2007-10-23T01:40:39Z
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are widely used for describing interaction scenarios between the components of a distributed system. Consequently, worst-case response time estimation and schedulability analysis of MSC-based speci.-cations form natural building blocks for designing distributed real-time systems. However, currently there exists a large gap between the timing and quantitative performance analysis techniques that exist in the real-time systems literature, and the modeling/speci.cation techniques that are advocated by the formal methods community. As a result, although a number of schedulability analysis techniques are known for a variety of task graph-based models, it is not clear if they can be used to effectively analyze standard speci.cation formalisms such as MSCs. In this work, we make an attempt to bridge this gap by proposing a schedulability analysis technique for MSC-based system speci.cations. We show that compared to existing timing analysis techniques for distributed real-time systems, our pro-posed analysis gives tighter results, which immediately translate to better system design and improved resource dimensioning. We illustrate the details of our analy-sis using a setup from the automotive electronics domain, which consist of two real-life application programs (that are naturally modeled using MSCs) running on a platform consisting of multiple electronic control units (ECUs) connected via a FlexRay bus.