TucanVirtual prototype generation and time constraints analysis of real-time embedded systems

This paper presents Tucan, an approach to automatically create a virtual prototype (VP) and to support the analysis of VP testing results to validate time constraint requirements in real-time embedded systems. Virtual prototyping is a fast and reliable solution to facilitate system testing and time constraint validation. However, analyzing simulation results involves the visual inspection of timing diagrams, which is a time-consuming and complicated task. The complexity of the task grows depending on the number of signals present in a simulation; furthermore, their analysis is prone to errors due to the difficulty in identifying dependencies between the signals created by the system architecture. Our main contributions are: (1) the automatic generation of a high quality VP from a high level specification; (2) the specification of duration constraints, i.e., execution time of components that must be kept within an average time; and (3) duration requirement analysis based on predicted versus obtained behavior. We are able to predict system behavior by building a VP with a behavior model based on Time Petri Nets. We present the advantages of our method through a case study that illustrates the strength of Tucan in helping determine what variations at a specific component level allow the fulfillment of a set of time constraints.