Timed Games for Computing WCET for Pipelined Processors with Caches

We introduce a framework for computing upper bounds of WCET for hardware with caches and pipelines. The methodology we propose consists of 3 steps: 1) given a program to analyse, compute an equivalent (WCET-wise) abstract program, 2) build a timed game by composing this abstract program with a network of timed automata modelling the architecture, and 3) compute the WCET as the optimal time to reach a winning state in this game. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework on standard benchmarks for an ARM9 processor with instruction and data caches, and compute the WCET with UPPAAL-TiGA.