Modeling Assembly Program with Constraints: A Contribution to WCET Problem
Sep 2012
Model checking with program slicing has been successfully applied to compute Worst Case Execution Time(WCET) of a program running in a given hardware. This method lacks path feasibility analysis and suffers from additional problems. This thesis complements the above method with adopting constraint solving techniques to path feasibility analysis by a) validating the witness trace returned by the Model Checker and generate test data if it is executable; b) computing approximate WCET solely based on the program, suggesting probable paths that upper bound the WCET. This combination of constraint solving technique with model checking takes advantages of their strengths and makes WCET computation scalable and amenable to hardware changes. The techniques developed were tested on standard benchmark programs from Mälardalen University and compared with results obtained from model checking methods.
