Towards Accurate Monitoring of Extra-Functional Properties in Real-Time Embedded Systems

Management and preservation of Extra-Functional Properties (EFPs) is critical in real-time embedded systems to ensure their correct behavior. Deviation of these properties, such as timing and memory usage, from their acceptable and valid values can impair the functionality of the system. In this regard, monitoring is an important means to investigate the state of the system and identify such violations. The monitoring result can also be used to make adaptation and re-configuration decisions in the system as well. Most of the works related to monitoring EFPs are based on the assumption that monitoring results accurately represent the true state of the system at the monitoring request time point. In some systems this assumption can be safe and valid. However, if in a system the value of an EFP changes frequently, the result of monitoring may not accurately represent the state of the system at the time point when the monitoring request has been issued. The consequences of such inaccuracies can be critical in certain systems and applications. In this paper, we mainly introduce and discuss this practical problem and also provide a solution to improve the monitoring accuracy of EFPs.