Mälardalen University Press Licentiate Theses No.52 Modeling the Temporal Behavior of Complex Embedded Systems A Reverse Engineering Approach

Software systems embedded in complex products such as cars, telecom sys-tems and industrial robots are typically very large, containing millions of lines of code, and have been developed by hundreds of engineers over many years. We refer to such software systems as complex embedded systems. When maintaining such systems it is difficult to predict how changes may impact the system behavior, due to the complexity. This is especially true for the temporal properties of the system, e.g. response times, since the temporal behavior is dependent on many factors that are not visible in the implemen-tation, such as execution time. The state-of-the-practice is therefore often the trial-and-error approach, i.e. implement and test. However, errors related to the temporal behavior are often hard to find while testing the system and may cause major economic losses if they occur post-release, since they typically result in system failures. This thesis presents a method for predicting these types of errors in a