Expressing and exploiting path conflicts in WCET analysis

The presence of infeasible paths in a program is a source of imprecision in the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET) analysis. Detecting, expressing and exploiting such paths can improve the WCET estimation or, at least, improve the confidence we have in estimation precision. In this article, we propose an extension of the FFX format to express conflicts over paths and we detail two ways of enhancing the WCET analyses with that information. We demonstrate and compare these techniques on the Mälardalen benchmark suite and on C code generated from Esterel