# Early Timing Analysis based on Scenario Requirements and Platform Models (Extended Abstract)

Jörg Holtmann, Julien Deantoni, Markus Fockel

► To cite this version:

Jörg Holtmann, Julien Deantoni, Markus Fockel. Early Timing Analysis based on Scenario Requirements and Platform Models (Extended Abstract). Software Engineering 2023, Feb 2023, Paderborn, Germany. pp.69-70. hal-04259779

HAL Id: hal-04259779

https://inria.hal.science/hal-04259779v1

Submitted on 26 Oct 2023

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Early Timing Analysis based on Scenario Requirements and
Platform Models (Extended Abstract)

Jörg Holtmann<fnref n="1" />, Julien Deantoni<fnref n="2" />, Markus Fockel<fnref n="3" />

**Abstract:** This extended abstract summarizes our article [HDF22], published in the Journal of Software and Systems Modeling and presented as Journal First paper at MODELS'22.

**Keywords:** scenario-based requirements; platform modeling; real-time systems; timing analysis

Distributed, software-intensive systems must fulfill communication requirements under
hard real-time constraints. The requirements have to be documented and validated carefully
using a systematic requirements engineering (RE) approach, for example, by applying
scenario-based requirements notations. The resources of the execution platforms and their
properties induce effects on the timing behavior, which may lead to violations of the
real-time requirements.

Such violations of the real-time requirements can occur for various reasons: The ECUs
executing the software have restricted resources that increase execution times; the buses
and wireless communication media have restricted resources increasing transmission times;
the preemption induced by scheduling policies increase response times, et cetera. More
generally, the various properties of the particular resources of the execution platform
(resource properties) impact the timing behavior by inducing timing effects (i.e., delays)
during the provision of the actual functionality.

Nowadays, the platform resource properties and their induced timing effects are verified
against the real-time requirements by means of timing analysis techniques mostly imple-
mented in commercial-off-the-shelf tools. However, such timing analyses are conducted in
late development phases since they rely on artifacts produced during these phases.

For enabling timing analyses already in the early RE phase, related work provides means to
specify and analyze timed behavioral models (typically relying on scenario- or automata-
based notations), thereby abstracting from the final platform-specific artifacts. However,
such approaches typically require to reenact and pre-calculate the timing effects induced by
the resource properties and to specify them as part of the timed behavioral models.

Thus, in order to enable early timing analyses already during RE and to relieve the timing
analysts from the burden to pre-calculate and to specify the timing effects induced by the

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<footnote n="1">¹ Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Interaction Design & Software Engineering, Sweden jorg.holtmann@gu.se</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Universite Cote d'Azur, I3S/INRIA Kairos, France julien.deantoni@univ-cotedazur.fr</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Fraunhofer IEM, Safe and Secure IoT Systems, Germany Markus.Fockel@iem.fraunhofer.de</footnote>
platform resource properties as part of behavioral models, we extend a scenario-based
requirements notation with allocation means to platform models and define operational
semantics for the purpose of simulation-based, platform-aware timing analyses. Figure 1
sketches an overview of the approach and of the contributions.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: Overview of the Approach and Contributions</figcaption></figure>

Since the targeted real-time software-intensive systems strongly rely on message-based
communication, we base the real-time requirements on our timed and component-based
dialect of the scenario-based notation of Modal Sequence Diagrams (MSDs) (cf. left-hand
side of Figure 1). Like the related work, the modeling and analysis means provided by our
dialect enable specifying and validating real-time requirements but incorporate platform-
specific aspects only insufficiently. To provide both an abstract specification of the execution
platform with its particular resource properties and the allocation of MSD specifications to
the execution platform, we furthermore extend platform modeling concepts of the real-time
modeling UML profile MARTE (cf. middle of Figure 1). Based on the modeling languages
mentioned above, we introduce as main contribution a new operational semantics for
platform-aware MSDs dedicated to timing analyses (cf. arrow in the middle of Figure 1).
This semantics encompasses an extended MSD message event handling semantics and
particularly encapsulates the computation of the resource properties into platform-induced
timing effects. To operationalize the semantics, we apply our workbench GEMOC Studio
for the declarative specification of executable modeling languages. The overall approach
then enables verifying the timing effects w.r.t. the real-time requirements specified by timed
MSDs in platform-aware timing analyses through applying simulation and model checking
in our tool suite TIMESQUARE (cf. right-hand side of Figure 1).

**Data Availability** The supplementary material encompasses the tooling for the actual approach, the tooling for parts of the evaluation, and evaluation data that is more detailed than in the published article. We published it at Zenodo (cf. reference in the article).

Bibliography

[HDF22] Holtmann, Jörg; Deantoni, Julien; Fockel, Markus: Early Timing Analysis based on Scenario Requirements and Platform Models. Software and Systems Modeling (Theme Section on Model-Driven Requirements Engineering), 21(6):2171–2211, 2022. J1st @ MODELS’22.