Similarities between Timing Constraint Sets: Towards Interchangeable Constraint Models for Real-World Software Systems

Traditionally, given two timing constraint sets, their relationship is defined by their timed trace inclusions. This approach only gives a boolean answer to if one set of constraints is contained within the other. In this paper, we first introduce a quantitative measure to describe the closeness or the similarity between two timing constraint sets. We intend to study the satisfaction bounds of similar timing constraint sets by similar timed systems. Such bounds will help improve the predictability of real-time systems in real-world applications and provide guidance for self-tuning systems.