Detecting Design Errors in Composite Events for Event Triggered Real-Time Systems Using Timed Automata

Many applications need to detect and respond to occurring events and combine these event occurrences into new events with a higher level of abstraction. Specifying how events can be combined is often supported by design tools specific to the current event processing engine. However, the issue of ensuring that the combinations of events provide the system with the correct combination of information is often left to the developer to analyze. We argue that analyzing correctness of event composition is a complex task that needs tool support. In this paper we present a novel development tool for specifying composition of events with time constraints. One key feature of our tool is to automatically transform composite events for real-time systems into a timed automaton representation. The timed automaton representation allow us to check for design errors, for example, whether the outcome of combining events with different operators in different consumption policies is consistent with the requirement specification