Towards Programming Primitives for Hard Real-Time Constraints and Runtime Monitoring in Timed C

The stringent timing requirements of hard real-time systems are typically guaranteed by first estimating safe worst-case execution time (WCET) values for a set of tasks, followed by a schedulability analysis. Furthermore, many schemes for developing systems with mixed real-time constraints make use of runtime monitoring. In case of timing violations at runtime, runtime monitoring can automatically discover incorrect WCET estimations. However, many programming languages do not have direct constructs for programming both hard timing constraints and runtime monitoring requirements. In this paper, we introduce direct primitives for programming hard timing constraints and runtime monitoring for a recently introduced real-time programming language called Timed C. We investigate the usability and limitations of these primitives by using a synthetic case study of an unmanned aerial vehicle and two Timed C examples encoding different types of mixed-criticality systems.QC 20210517