Performance evaluation of complex real-time systems, a case study

Abstract — With the increase of complexity of modern in-dustrial systems, it is more difficult than ever to predict their qualitative (correctness) properties and quantitative (perfor-mance) properties. In order to cope with the complexity of these systems and shorten their design time, system-level de-sign has become one of the most important parts in the mod-ern design flow. The core of a system-level design method is an expressive and well-founded modelling language, pro-viding ample means for developing adequate system mod-els. POOSL (Parallel Object-Oriented Specification Lan-guage) is one of such modelling languages which enables to construct succinct executable models for complex real-time hardware/software systems. This paper describes our experience with applying the POOSL language to model the industrial MA3 (a More Ac-cessible Micro Assembler with a Modular Architecture) sys-tem and to evaluate its performance. The system can be characterized as a distributed real-time system consisting of independent processing units physically interconnected by an Ethernet. The POOSL model of the system examines its real-time performance from a system-level point of view. By evaluating the response delay of the system against the ca-pacity (the number of processing units) of the system, proper design decisions can be made about the architecture of the system