The Priority Inversion Problem and Real-Time Symbolic Model Checking

Priority inversion is a serious problem that can make real-time systems unpredictable in subtle ways. This makes it more difficult to implement and debug such systems. Our work discusses this problem and presents one possible solution. The solution is formalized and verified using temporal logic model checking techniques. In order to perform the verification, the bdd-based symbolic model checking algorithm given in [4, 11] was extended to handle real-time properties using the bounded until operator [9]. We believe that this algorithm, which is based on discrete time, is able to handle many real-time properties that arise in practical problems. This research was sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation under grant no. CCR-8722633, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation under contract 92-DJ-294, and by The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Information Science and Technology Office, under the title "Research on Parallel Computing", ARPA Order No. 7330, issued by DA..