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Automata-Based Timed Event Program Comprehension for Real-Time Systems

Authors:
Aziz Fellah
Ajay Bandi

Keywords: Program comprehension; program understanding; software modeling; real-time systems; embedded systems; IoT; timed event automata.

Abstract:
In this paper, we extend the software space of program comprehension to real-time systems and introduce two orthogonal and hybrid paradigms that we refer to as timed event component comprehension and timed event program comprehension. The former, timed event component comprehension, with no role in the coding aspect, is a set of autonomous timed event components that provide a high level system-specific functionality about the overall real-time system including its structure, components and their synchronized interrelationships at different level of granularity, and static and dynamic behaviors. The later, timed event program comprehension recovers high level of information from timed event component comprehension and then builds an automata-based model about the system. This process occurs before carrying any program comprehension. We show that both paradigms are intrinsically linked and neither of them can be explored in isolation. Importantly, we map the component comprehension paradigm into a distinguished component class that we refer to as timed event components (TeCmp) which, in turn, are formally modeled as timed event automata, a powerful canonical model for modeling and verifying real-time computations. Furthermore, to support this research towards an effective program comprehension geared towards real-time and embedded systems, we investigated and evaluated the effect of our approach through a practical Internet of Things (IoT) case study.

Pages: 21 to 28

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2019

Publication date: October 27, 2019

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2519-8475

ISBN: 978-1-61208-750-4

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from October 27, 2019 to October 31, 2019