Supporting timing analysis of vehicular embedded systems through the refinement of timing constraints

The collective use of several models and tools at various abstraction levels and phases during the development of vehicular distributed embedded systems poses many challenges. Within this context, this paper targets the challenges that are concerned with the unambiguous refinement of timing requirements, constraints and other timing information among various abstraction levels. Such information is required by the end-to-end timing analysis engines to provide pre-run-time verification about the predictability of these systems. The paper proposes an approach to represent and refine such information among various abstraction levels. As a proof of concept, the approach provides a representation of the timing information at the higher levels using the models that are developed with EAST-ADL and Timing Augmented Description Language. The approach then refines the timing information for the lower abstraction levels. The approach exploits the Rubus Component Model at the lower level to represent the timing information that cannot be clearly specified at the higher levels, such as trigger paths in distributed chains. A vehicular-application case study is conducted to show the applicability of the proposed approach.