Simulation-Based Timing Analysis of Complex Real-Time Systems

This paper presents an efficient best-effort approach for simulation-based timing analysis of complex real-time systems. The method can handle in principle any software design that can be simulated, and is based on controlling simulation input using a simple yet novel hill-climbing algorithm. Unlike previous approaches, the new algorithm directly manipulates simulation parameters such as execution times, arrival jitter and input. An evaluation is presented using six different simulation models, and two other simulation methods as reference: Monte Carlo simulation and MABERA. The new method proposed in this paper was 4-11% more accurate while at the same time 42 times faster, on average, than the reference methods.