Deadlock risk assessment in architectural models of real-time systems

Software Architectural Assessment is a key discipline to identify at early stages of a system synthesis the problems that may become critical in its operation. This matter is especially relevant for those systems with real-time constraints. In this paper a special emphasis shall be made on concurrency issues. Typical mechanisms supporting concurrency, such as semaphores or monitors, usually lead to concurrency problems in execution time hard to identify, reproduce and solve. For this reason it is crucial to understand the root causes of these problems and to provide support to identify and mitigate them at early stages of the system lifecycle.