Timed Games for Computing Worst-Case Execution-Times

In this paper we introduce a framework for computing upper bounds yet accurate WCET for hardware platforms with caches and pipelines. The methodology we propose consists of 3 steps: 1) given a program to analyse, compute an equivalent (WCET-wise) abstract program; 2) build a timed game by composing this abstract program with a network of timed automata modeling the architecture; and 3) compute the WCET as the optimal time to reach a winning state in this game. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework on standard benchmarks for an ARM9 processor with instruction and data caches, and compute the WCET with UPPAAL-TiGA. We also show that this framework can easily be extended to take into account dynamic changes in the speed of the processor during program execution.