A Unified Model for Analysis of Real-Time Properties

A model-driven design approach that provides a unified way of modeling real-time systems, covering both functional and timing characteristics, enables designers to reason about different properties. Refinements of the model should be easy to construct in order to obtain a complete specification from which the implementation may be automatically generated. Previous work has shown how, in the Software/Hardware Engineering design method, the preservation of all system properties when synthesizing the model can be guaranteed upto to a small time-deviation. This technique is well suited for control-systems, in which execution times of actions are very small, so the time-deviations obtained are small as well. However, it is not applicable for systems containing time-intensive computations because the time-deviations become large. This paper proposes an approach for imposing less restrictive timing constraints in order to decrease the time-deviation between model and implementation for this kind of systems. Furthermore, we present a mechanism for analyzing their timing behavior together with the estimation of the time-deviation.