Checking Metric Temporal Logic with TRACE

Abstract

Execution traces, time-stamped sequences of events, provide a general, domain-independent, view on the behavior of systems. They enable analysis of metrics such as latency, pipeline depth and throughput. Often, however, it is not clear what such metrics exactly mean and ad hoc methods are used to compute them. Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) can be used to address this issue: it enables the formal specification of quantitative properties on execution traces. We thus have added an MTL checking capability to the TRACE tool, which is a tool for viewing and analyzing execution traces [1]. We use a recursive memoization algorithm that generates concise explanations of the truth value of the given MTL formula. These explanations can be visualized in the TRACE viewer to aid interpretation by the user.