Model level worst-case execution time analysis for IEC 61499

The IEC 61499 standard provides a possibility to develop industrial embedded systems in a component-based manner. Besides alleviating the efforts of system design, the component-based approach also allows analysis of various system characteristics using system models even before the actual deployment. One of the crucial characteristics in the domain of safety-critical and real-time systems is timing: a failure to execute a specific task on time can have severe consequences. This paper presents a method for compositional model-level analysis of worst-case execution time of IEC 61499 software models. The analysis is performed on one hierarchical level of composition at a time, and the results can be stored together with the software artefact to be used when analysis is performed on the higher hierarchical level, or when the unit is reused in another system. The analysis has been implemented as a plug-in for the 4DIAC tool.