Towards a Practical WCET Analysis Approach Based on Testing

Abstract—Analyzing the worst-case execution time, the WCET, of a program or task is an important activity when constructing hard real-time systems. Traditional techniques like testing and measurements now face problems due to the introduction of cache memories. This paper presents a new approach that enhances the traditional testing methodology with different analysis methods. The safeness of individual program paths are guaranteed by the use of a safety margin. Furthermore, the approach provides help for the tester to find the critical paths to measure. The approach is demonstrated for a processor containing an instruction cache. The results indicate that this promises to be a simple and practical approach that still can result in low overestimation of the WCET. I