Statistical model checking of processor systems in various interrupt scenarios

Abstract

Many practical, especially real-time, systems are expected to be predictable under various sources of unpredictability. To cope with the expectation, a system must be modeled and analyzed precisely for various operating conditions. This represents a problem that grows with the dynamics of the system and that must be, typically, solved before the system starts to operate. Due to the general complexity of the problem, this paper focuses just to processor based systems with interruptible executions. Their predictability analysis becomes more difficult especially when interrupts may occur at arbitrary times, suffer from arrival and servicing jitters, are subject to priorities, or may be nested and un/masked at run-time. Such a behavior of interrupts and executions has stochastic aspects and leads to the explosion of the number of situations to be considered. To cope with such a behavior, we propose a simulation model that relies on a network of stochastic timed automata and involves the above-mentioned behavioral aspects related to interrupts and executions. For a system, modeled by means of the automata, we show that the problem of analyzing its predictability may be efficiently solved by means of the statistical model checking.