Making resource analysis practical for real-time Java

Abstract

For real-time and embedded systems limiting the consumption of time and memory resources is often an important part of the requirements. Being able to predict bounds on the consumption of these resources during the development process of the code can be of great value.Recent research results have advanced the state of the art of resource consumption analysis. In this paper we present a tool that makes it possible to apply these research results in practice for real-time systems enabling Java developers to analyse loop bounds, bounds on heap size and bounds on stack size. We describe which theoretical additions were needed in order to achieve this.We give an overview of the capabilities of the tool ResAna that is the result of this effort. The tool can not only perform generally applicable analyses, but it also contains a part of the analysis which is dedicated to the developers' (real-time) virtual machine, such that the results apply directly to the actual development environment that is used in practice.

Univariate polynomial solutions of algebraic difference equations

“…There the authors consider the size of an output as a polynomial function on the sizes of inputs. In the Charter project the authors developed the ResAna tool (Kersten et al, 2012) that applies polynomial interpolation to generate an upper bound on Java loop iterations. The tool requires the user to input the degree of the solution.…”

A type-based complexity analysis of Object Oriented programs

“…Another interesting line of research is based on the analysis of heap-space and time consumption of Java bytecode [20,21,22,23]. The results from [20,21,22] make use of abstract interpretations to infer efficiently symbolic upper bounds on resource consumption of Java programs. A constraint-based static analysis is used in [23] and focuses on certifying memory bounds for Java Card.…”

ResAna: a resource analysis toolset for (real‐time) JAVA

“…The loop‐bound analysis provided by the RESANA tool can be of further use both for deriving memory bounds and for deriving time bounds. This article is an extended version of an earlier paper . How this paper extends is described in Section 6.…”

“…Reasons for studying real‐time JAVA include more possibilities for code reuse, more available tools and more programmers that are highly experienced in the use of the language. The RESANA toolset, which is presented in this paper, is one of the results of the CHARTER project . Together, the tools produced by the CHARTER project provide a first step towards the use of general programming languages for safety‐critical systems.…”