Flexible support for time and costs in scenario-aware dataflow

Abstract

Scenario-aware dataflow is a formalism to model modern dynamic embedded applications whose behaviour is heavily dependent on input data or the operational environment. Key behavioural aspects are the execution times and energy consumption of a system's components. In this paper, we introduce flexible scenario-aware dataflow : a proper generalisation of previous definitions that allows any execution time to be specified as discretely or continuously random or nondeterministic. Additionally, it supports the modelling of abstract costs like the energy usage of components. We give a formal compositional semantics in terms of networks of stochastic timed automata. We have implemented support for analysing performance properties of flexible scenario-aware dataflow graphs via simulation and model checking. A number of reduction techniques are applied to make the underlying state spaces tractable for model checking. We evaluate the scalability and performance of our new model and implementation on standard benchmarks.