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Schedulability and Verification of Real-Time Discrete-Event Systems
Christos Stergiou

Citation
Christos Stergiou. "Schedulability and Verification of Real-Time Discrete-Event Systems". Talk or presentation, 16, September, 2013.

Abstract
Cyber-physical systems are systems where there is a tight interaction between the computing world and the physical world. In spite of the significance of time in the dynamics of the physical world, real-time embedded software today is commonly built using programming abstractions with little or no temporal semantics. PTIDES (Programming Temporally Integrated Distributed Embedded Systems) is a programming model whose goal is to address this problem. It proposes a model-based design approach for the programming of distributed real-time embedded systems, in which the timing of real-time operations is specified as part of the model. This is accomplished by using as an underlying formalism a discrete-event (DE) model of computation, which is extended with real-time semantics. We address the schedulability question for PTIDES programs and uniprocessor platforms. A PTIDES program is schedulable if for all legal sensor inputs, there exists a scheduling of the PTIDES components that meets all the specified deadlines. The timing specifications allowed in the discrete-event formalism can be seen as a generalization of end-to-end latencies which are usually studied in the hard real-time computing literature. This results in a rather idiosyncratic schedulability problem. We first show that for a large subset of discrete-event models, the earliest-deadline-first scheduling policy is optimal. Second, we show that all but a finite part of the infinite state space of a PTIDES execution results in demonstrably unschedulable behaviors. As a result the schedulability problem can be reduced to a finite-state reachability problem. We describe this reduction using timed automata. We next turn to the verification problem for DE systems themselves. We study a basic deterministic DE model, where actors are simple constant-delay components, and two extensions of it: first, one where actors are not constant but introduce non-deterministic delays, and second, one where actors are either deterministic delays or are specified using timed automata. We investigate verification questions on DE models and examine expressiveness relationships between the DE models and timed automata. Finally, we discuss extensions of this work to cover a wider range of discrete-event actors, and propose an approach to design more efficient and practical analyses for schedulability testing.

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Citation formats  
  • HTML
    Christos Stergiou. <a
    href="http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/pubs/1017.html"
    ><i>Schedulability and Verification of Real-Time
    Discrete-Event Systems</i></a>, Talk or
    presentation,  16, September, 2013.
  • Plain text
    Christos Stergiou. "Schedulability and Verification of
    Real-Time Discrete-Event Systems". Talk or
    presentation,  16, September, 2013.
  • BibTeX
    @presentation{Stergiou13_SchedulabilityVerificationOfRealTimeDiscreteEventSystems,
        author = {Christos Stergiou},
        title = {Schedulability and Verification of Real-Time
                  Discrete-Event Systems},
        day = {16},
        month = {September},
        year = {2013},
        abstract = {Cyber-physical systems are systems where there is
                  a tight interaction between the computing world
                  and the physical world. In spite of the
                  significance of time in the dynamics of the
                  physical world, real-time embedded software today
                  is commonly built using programming abstractions
                  with little or no temporal semantics. PTIDES
                  (Programming Temporally Integrated Distributed
                  Embedded Systems) is a programming model whose
                  goal is to address this problem. It proposes a
                  model-based design approach for the programming of
                  distributed real-time embedded systems, in which
                  the timing of real-time operations is specified as
                  part of the model. This is accomplished by using
                  as an underlying formalism a discrete-event (DE)
                  model of computation, which is extended with
                  real-time semantics. We address the schedulability
                  question for PTIDES programs and uniprocessor
                  platforms. A PTIDES program is schedulable if for
                  all legal sensor inputs, there exists a scheduling
                  of the PTIDES components that meets all the
                  specified deadlines. The timing specifications
                  allowed in the discrete-event formalism can be
                  seen as a generalization of end-to-end latencies
                  which are usually studied in the hard real-time
                  computing literature. This results in a rather
                  idiosyncratic schedulability problem. We first
                  show that for a large subset of discrete-event
                  models, the earliest-deadline-first scheduling
                  policy is optimal. Second, we show that all but a
                  finite part of the infinite state space of a
                  PTIDES execution results in demonstrably
                  unschedulable behaviors. As a result the
                  schedulability problem can be reduced to a
                  finite-state reachability problem. We describe
                  this reduction using timed automata. We next turn
                  to the verification problem for DE systems
                  themselves. We study a basic deterministic DE
                  model, where actors are simple constant-delay
                  components, and two extensions of it: first, one
                  where actors are not constant but introduce
                  non-deterministic delays, and second, one where
                  actors are either deterministic delays or are
                  specified using timed automata. We investigate
                  verification questions on DE models and examine
                  expressiveness relationships between the DE models
                  and timed automata. Finally, we discuss extensions
                  of this work to cover a wider range of
                  discrete-event actors, and propose an approach to
                  design more efficient and practical analyses for
                  schedulability testing. },
        URL = {http://chess.eecs.berkeley.edu/pubs/1017.html}
    }
    

Posted by Armin Wasicek on 16 Sep 2013.
Groups: chessworkshop
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