Software-hardware interaction analysis based on Petri Net

As software and hardware have grown in functionality and complexity, the existing computer systems are confronting serious challenges with safety, dependability and reliability. Being one of the primary causes with responsibility for these challenges, the software-hardware interaction is advanced and widely studied in recent years. Unfortunately, none of the state-of-art researches has achieved widespread applicability in analyzing software-hardware interaction. Due to a lack of general model to describe the process, we present a software-hardware interaction model based on Petri Net(SHIPN), and also propose the systemic analysis method and process for software-hardware interaction. Indicating as a six-tuple Petri Net, SHIPN is a logic model of system events, and denote the cause and effect between the software events and hardware events, as well as the process of system events. Especially, SHIPN has non-conflict, non-collision and non-competition of resources, and is essentially different from the traditional Petri Net. Subsequently, we define formalized software-hardware interaction events on the basis of SHIPN, and designed an analysis algorithm based on the incident matrix to deduce causations and propagation paths of each software-hardware interaction. An application case in the communication control system demonstrates that SHIPN is an accurate and practicable model, and the proposed method provides an effective approach to analyze software-hardware interaction.