Time for Reactive System Modeling: Interactive Timing Analysis with Hotspot Highlighting

Abstract

Modeling tools typically provide no information about timing properties and costly parts of the system under development. In this paper we propose a generic approach to integrate timing analysis and modeling tools. This approach includes visual highlighting to guide the user to worst-case execution time hotspots, detailed timing information for specific model elements, and the separation of different types of timing values. Our solution includes both a way to keep track of model elements subject to timing analysis during the compilation process, and a flexible and formally defined timing analysis interface for communicating timing information between a high-level modeling tool and a lower-level timing analysis tool. We present a complete open-source, Eclipse-based prototype tool chain that is evaluated both using a systematic benchmark suite and a user study.