Program Semantics in Model-Based WCET Analysis: A State of the Art Perspective ∗

Advanced design techniques of safety-critical applications use specialized development model-based methods. Under this setting, the application exists at several levels of description, as the result of a sequence of transformations. On the positive side, the application is developed in a systematic way, while on the negative side, its high-level semantics may be obfuscated when rep-resented at the lower levels. The application should provide certain functional and non-functional guarantees. When the application is a hard real-time program, such guarantees could be dead-lines, thus making the computation of worst-case execution time (WCET) bounds mandatory. This paper overviews, in the context of WCET analysis, what are the existing techniques to ex-tract, express and exploit the program semantics along the model-based development workflow