Investigation of the pessimism in distributed systems timing analysis

This paper describes work carried out to reduce the pessimism in distributed systems timing analysis. The starting point for the paper is the need to prove that the timing properties of a system are met in an efficient and effective manner. The paper shows that an exact approach to the analysis can be intractable, and other approaches are too pessimistic. Using extensive simulation, based on realistic requirements from the domain of interest, a new approach to distributed timing analysis is developed using an integrated approach to task attribute assignment and timing analysis. The new approach is up to 20% more effective than previous tractable approaches. An additional benefit is the approach has a greater resilience to change than the other approaches considered. The results contained within the paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.