Specification and timing analysis of real-time systems

The correctness of hard real-time systems depends not only on the correct functional behavior but also on the correct temporal behavior. That is, the designed hard real-time system should meet all its functional and timing requirements even in the worst case. By performing timing analysis in early stages of the system life cycle, it is possible to reduce the overall development costs. This is due to the fact that the detection of the deadline violation in hard real-time systems will often lead to a complete redesign. Therefore the integration of system specification and timing analysis will be very helpful in the design of hard real-time systems. In this paper a method is proposed which supports both functional and timing verification of the specified system. The method integrates the extended specification and description language (SDL) and message sequence chart (MSC) specifications with the task allocation and schedulability analysis algorithms. The extensions of SDL and MSC are annotations in form of embedded comments in the original languages. They are used to describe the timing requirements of the specified system. The usability of the proposed method is illustrated through a case study.