Sound and Efficient Wcet Analysis in the Presence of Timing Anomalies1

Worst-Case-Execution-Time (WCET) analysis computes upper bounds on the execution time of a program on a given hardware platform. Abstractions employed for static timing analysis can lead to non-determinism that may require the analyzer to evaluate an exponential number of choices even for straight-line code. Pruning the search space is potentially unsafe because of “timing anomalies” where local worst-case choices may not lead to the global worst-case scenario. In this paper we present an approach towards more efficient WCET analysis that uses precomputed information to safely discard analysis states.