Static WCET Analysis of Real-Time Task-Oriented Code in Vehicle Control Systems

Methods for worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis have been known for some time, and recently commercial tools have emerged. This technique is gradually being entered into industry to analyse real production codes. This article presents a case study where the aiT WCET analysis tool was used to find upper time bounds for task-oriented vehicular control code. The main purpose was to investigate the practical difficulties that arise when applying the current WCET analysis methods to this particular kind of code. In particular, we were interested in how labor-intense the analysis becomes, measured by the number of manual annotations necessary for calculating a WCET estimate. We were also interested how much tighter WCET estimates will become by manually adding extra annotations, and how much additional work that is needed to give these annotations. We also made some systematic comparisons between calculated and measured WCET estimates for the analysed system.