Automatic Amortised Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis

Abstract

Our research focuses on formally bounded WCET analysis, where we aim to provide absolute guarantees on execution time bounds. In this paper, we describe how amortisation can be used to improve the quality of the results that are obtained from a fully-automatic and formally guaranteed WCET analysis, by delivering analysis results that are parameterised on specific input patterns and which take account of relations between these patterns. We have implemented our approach to give a tool that is capable of predicting execution costs for a typical embedded system development platform, a Renesas board with a Renesas M32C/85U processor. We show that not only is the amortised approach applicable in theory, but that it can be applied automatically to yield good WCET results.