Impact analysis in real-time control systems

Abstract

Real-time control systems typically receive streams of sampled data signals, process them, and generate output to control devices via actuators. Control system components make assumptions about sampling rate and other characteristics, such as filtering, of data streams. These application-specific semantic dependencies and time-sensitive semantic properties are usually not explicit in the source code implementation. This paper discusses an approach to modeling the system architecture of realtime applications, capturing semantic dependencies, and recording time-sensitive properties. Analysis of the model can identify inconsistencies in a system design and can determine the impact of a system change. This architectural dependency model can evolve incrementally to record hidden side effects, as they are discovered during maintenance, and prevent such errors in the future.

Prevention of failures due to assumptions made by software components in real-time systems

“…However, they cannot handle assumptions which are not represented as code (physical representation). The work most closely related to our work is [6]. In comparison, our framework is based on an open standard, making it extensible.…”