SAT and LP Collaborative Bounded Timing Analysis of Scenario-Based Specifications

Timing analysis of scenario-based specifications (SBS) such as message sequence charts and UML interaction models plays an essential role in the design phase of real-time system development. However, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to conduct analysis on the satisfiability of the timing constraints. In this article, we propose a novel SAT and linear programming (LP) collaborative timing analysis approach named TASSAT for SBS. Instead of using depth-first traversal algorithms, TASSAT encodes the structures of the SBS into propositional formulas and use the SAT solver to find candidate paths. The timing analysis of candidate paths is then reduced to LP problems, where irreducible infeasible set of the infeasible path can be used to prune unnecessary search space of the SAT solver. The experimental results show that TASSAT is effective and offers better performance than existing tools in terms of both time consumption and memory footprint.