Probabilistic Timing Analysis (PTA) in general and its measurement-based variant called MBPTA in particular can mitigate some of the problems that impair current worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis techniques. MBPTA computes tight WCET bounds expressed as probabilistic exceedance functions, without needing much information on the hardware and software internals of the system. Classic WCET analysis has information needs that may be costly and difficult to satisfy, and their omission increases pessimism. Previous work has shown that MBPTA does well with benchmark programs. Real-world applications however place more demanding requirements on timing analysis than simple benchmarks. It is interesting to see how PTA responds to them. This paper discusses the application of MBPTA to a real avionics system and presents lessons learned in that process. © 2013 IEEE.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Probabilistic Timing Analysis (PTA) in general and its measurement-based variant called MBPTA in particular have been shown to facilitate the estimation of the worst-case execution time (WCET). MBPTA relies on specific hardware and software support to randomise and/or upper bound a number of sources of execution time variation to drastically reduce the need for user-provided information, thus replacing uncertainty by probabilities. MBPTA has been proven effective for specific single-core processor designs. However, particular hardware features and multicores in general challenge MBPTA application in industrial-quality developments. While solutions to those challenges have been proven on benchmarks, they have not been proven yet on real-world applications, whose timing analysis is far more challenging than that of simple benchmarks. This paper discusses the application of MBPTA to a real avionics system in the context of (1) software-only single-core solutions and (2) hardware-only multicore solutions with an ARINC 653 operating system

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