accepted on the recommendation of

It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible. – Aristotle The soundness of real-time systems not only depends on the exactness of the results but also on their delivery according to given timing constraints. Real-time schedulers need an estimation of the worst-case execution time (i.e., the longest possible run time) of each process to guarantee that all the deadlines will be met. In addition to be necessary to guarantee the correctness of soft- and hard-real-time systems, the worst-case execution time is also useful in multimedia systems where it can be used to better distribute the computing resources among the processes by adapting the quality of service to the current system load. This dissertation presents a set of static compile-time analyses to estimate the worst-case execution time of Java processes focusing on the approximation of the WCET of fairly large soft-real-time applications on modern hardware systems