Automated timing analysis of real-time programs

ReStat is an interactive software tool for statically analysing the timing properties of real-time programs. Given a distributed program, a description of an architecture and a scheduling discipline, ReStat can be used to determine whether the implementation of the program on the architecture will meet a set of timing deadlines. The program may consist of a number of communicating processes and these can be statically assigned to any processor. Each process is assumed to have a simple, non-terminating cyclic structure, as is often the case in real-time control systems. ReStat uses a method of static analysis which establishes the timing properties of a real-time program by examining finite execution segments. The analysis is based on the syntactic structure of the program and can be efficiently implemented. The paper provides an overview of an experimental version of the tool and illustrates its use as a design aid by way of examples