doi: 10.7873/DATE.2015.0189


Timing Analysis of an Avionics Case Study on Complex Hardware/Software Platforms


Franck Wartel1, Leonidas Kosmidis2,3, Adriana Gogonel4, Andrea Baldovin5, Zoe Stephenson6, Benoit Triquet1, Eduardo Quiñones2, Code Lo4, Enrico Mezzetti5, Ian Broster6, Jaume Abella2, Liliana Cucu-Grosjean4, Tullio Vardanega5 and Francisco J. Cazorla2,7

1Airbus, France
2Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
3Universitat Polit’ecnica de Catalunya, Spain
4INRIA, France
5University of Padua, Italy
6Rapita Systems, UK
7Spanish National Research Council, Spain

ABSTRACT

Probabilistic Timing Analysis (PTA) in general and its measurement-based variant called MBPTA in particular have been shown to facilitate the estimation of the worst-case execution time (WCET). MBPTA relies on specific hardware and software support to randomise and/or upper bound a number of sources of execution time variation to drastically reduce the need for userprovided information, thus replacing uncertainty by probabilities.
MBPTA has been proven effective for specific single-core processor designs. However, particular hardware features and multicores in general challenge MBPTA application in industrialquality developments. While solutions to those challenges have been proven on benchmarks, they have not been proven yet on real-world applications, whose timing analysis is far more challenging than that of simple benchmarks. This paper discusses the application of MBPTA to a real avionics system in the context of (1) software-only single-core solutions and (2) hardware-only multicore solutions with an ARINC 653 operating system.



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