Testing of Timing Properties in Real-Time Systems: Verifying Clock Constraints

Ensuring that timing constraints in a real-time system are satisfied and met is of utmost importance. There are different static analysis methods that are introduced to statically evaluate the correctness of such systems in terms of timing properties, such as schedulability analysis techniques. Regardless of the fact that some of these techniques might be too pessimistic or hard to apply in practice, there are also situations that can still occur at runtime resulting in the violation of timing properties and thus invalidation of the static analyses' results. Therefore, it is important to be able to test the runtime behavior of a real-time system with respect to its timing properties. In this paper, we introduce an approach for testing the timing properties of real-time systems focusing on their internal clock constraints. For this purpose, test cases are generated from timed automata models that describe the timing behavior of real-time tasks. The ultimate goal is to verify that the actual timing behavior of the system at runtime matches the timed automata models. This is achieved by tracking and time-measuring of state transitions at runtime.