Skip Navigation


The Computer Journal Advance Access originally published online on September 26, 2007
The Computer Journal 2009 52(5):530-544; doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxm058
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
52/5/530    most recent
bxm058v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Ji, M.-L.
Right arrow Articles by Qi, Z.-C.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following The Computer Journal issue: Special Issue on Automation of Software Test AST [View the issue table of contents]

Automated Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis Based on Program Modes

Meng-Luo Ji1, Ji Wang2,*, Shuhao Li2 and Zhi-Chang Qi1

1 Department of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
2 National Laboratory for Parallel and Distributed Processing, Changsha, China

* Corresponding author: wj{at}nudt.edu.cn

Received 4 October 2006; revised 31 May 2007

A program mode is a regular trajectory of the execution of a program that is determined by the values of its input variables. By exploiting program modes, we may make worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis more precise. This paper presents a novel method to automatically find program modes and calculate the WCET estimates of programs. First, the modes of a program will be identified automatically by mode-relevant program slicing, and the precondition will be calculated for each mode using a path-wise test data generation method. Then, for each feasible mode, we show how to calculate its WCET estimate for modern reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors with caches and pipelines and for traditional complex instruction set computer (CISC) processors. We also present a method to obtain the symbolic expression for each mode for CISC processors. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the method.

Key Words: real-time systems • WCET analysis • program mode • program slicing • iterative relaxation method


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.