Feasibility Analysis in Safety-Critical Shared Resource Systems

Principal Investigator: Sanjoy K. Baruah
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Agency Number: CCR-9996434

Abstract
Feasibility analysis of a real-time system is the process of determining whether the system can be scheduled to meet its temporal requirements. In order to be able to build better automated tools for constructing complex real-time application systems, we must first clearly understand what factors are responsible for rendering certain systems feasible and others infeasible. This research proposes to enhance our understanding of the phenomenon of feasibility in real-time systems, and to obtain new tools, techniques, and methodologies for feasibility analysis in such systems. This will be done by providing a firm theoretical foundation to the analysis of feasibility in real-time systems. More specifically, questions relating to the following topics will be addressed: (i) Obtaining a generic framework for feasibility-analysis of a system, through the identification of its "worst-case behavior". (ii) Designing new abstract models of real-time tasks to accurately capture salient features of real-life application systems, and identifying rules for mapping application systems onto the most appropriate models. (iii) Analyzing various task models in order to enhance our understanding of what intrinsic properties render a model intractable from a feasibility analysis point of view, and to identify very general classes of tractable models. (iv) Determining alternate methods of analysis for task models for which feasibility-analysis is provably intractable. (v) constructing "proof-of-concept" software that validates the usefulness of the theoretical results obtained during the course of this research.