Verification and Scheduling Techniques for Real-Time Embedded Systems

• Main Author: Cortés, Luis Alejandro
• Format: Doctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Linköpings universitet, ESLAB 2005
• Subjects: Computer systems; Embedded computer systems; real-time systems; Computer science; Datavetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-5023; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:91-85297-21-6

Embedded computer systems have become ubiquitous. They are used in a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from household appliances and mobile devices to vehicle controllers and medical equipment. This dissertation deals with design and verification of embedded systems, with a special emphasis on the real-time facet of such systems, where the time at which the results of the computations are produced is as important as the logical values of these results. Within the class of real-time systems two categories, namely hard real-time systems and soft real-time systems, are distinguished and studied in this thesis. First, we propose modeling and verification techniques targeted towards hard real-time systems, where correctness, both logical and temporal, is of prime importance. A model of computation based on Petri nets is defined. The model can capture explicit timing information, allows tokens to carry data, and supports the concept of hierarchy. Also, an approach to the formal verification of systems represented in our modeling formalism is introduced, in which model checking is used to prove whether the system model satisfies its required properties expressed as temporal logic formulas. Several strategies for improving verification efficiency are presented and evaluated. Second, we present scheduling approaches for mixed hard/soft real-time systems. We study systems that have both hard and soft real-time tasks and for which the quality of results (in the form of utilities) depends on the completion time of soft tasks. Also, we study systems for which the quality of results (in the form of rewards) depends on the amount of computation allotted to tasks. We introduce quasi-static techniques, which are able to exploit at low cost the dynamic slack caused by variations in actual execution times, for maximizing utilities/rewards and for minimizing energy. Numerous experiments, based on synthetic benchmarks and realistic case studies, have been conducted in order to evaluate the proposed approaches. The experimental results show the merits and worthiness of the techniques introduced in this thesis and demonstrate that they are applicable on real-life examples.