Final year project proposal decription

Increasing complexity in development of real-time systems accompanied by the demand for enabling their configurability requires the integration of aspect-oriented software and component-based software development with real-time system development. The technology that integrates the two into real-time system development is ACCORD. ACCORD is developed within the COMET project, and it introduces a real-time component model (RTCOM) that provides explicit support for aspect weaving, while enforcing information hiding, i.e., preserve basic ideas from component-based and aspect-oriented software development. RTCOM consists of three parts, namely: (i) functional part, which can be modified by aspect weaving, (ii) run-time part, which describe the run-time behavior, e.g., worst-case execution time (WCET), of the components and aspects, and (iii) composition part, which describes the composition rules of components and aspects.

Since software technology for building real-time systems has to support predictability in the time domain, methods and tools for analyzing temporal behavior of the software composed out of components and aspects are needed. Knowing the WCET is of primary importance for timing analysis of real-time systems.

We have implemented a tool, called aspect analyzer, which enables automated WCET analysis of different configurations of aspects and components. The tool is based on the approach called aspect-level WCET analysis. The main goal of a tool for aspect-level WCET analysis is determining the WCET of different real-time system configurations consisting of aspects and components before any actual aspect weaving (system configuration) is performed, and, hence, help the designer of a configurable real-time system to choose the system configuration fitting the WCET needs of the underlying real-time environment without paying the price of aspect weaving for each individual candidate configuration.

The automated aspect-level WCET analysis and its main constituents are the following:

The goal of the project: The goal of this project is to extend the capabilities of Aspect Analyzer and provide verification of the tool. Current implementation of the Aspect analyzer relies on abstract WCET specifications as an input to the tool. However, to fully automate the process of aspect-level WCET analysis, we also need to ensure automated extraction (with help of existing tools) of WCET specifications. Hence the goals of this project can be summarized as follows: