Abstraction of assembler programs for symbolic worst case execution time analysis

Various techniques have been proposed to determine the worst case execution time of real-time systems. For most of these approaches, it is not necessary to capture the complete semantics of the system. Instead, it suffices to analyze an abstract model provided that it reflects the system's execution time correctly. To this end, we present an abstraction technique based on program slicing that can be used to simplify software systems at the level of assembler programs. The key idea is to determine a minimal set of instructions such that the control flow of the program is maintained. This abstraction is essential for reducing the runtime of the analysis algorithms, in particular, when symbolic methods are used to per-form a complete state space exploration.