Time Performance Formal Evaluation of Complex Systems

Formal verification methods, such as Model Checking, have been used for addressing performance/dependability analysis of systems. Such formal methods have several advantages over traditional techniques aiming at performance/dependability analysis such as the use of a single computational technique for evaluation of any measure and all complex numerical computation steps are hidden to the user. This paper reports on the use of Probabilistic Model Checking for time performance evaluation of complex systems. We propose an approach, TPerP, that allows a professional to clearly address time performance analysis based on Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC). Our approach takes into consideration several types of delay analyzes. We applied it to a balloonborne high energy astrophysics scientific experiment where we dealt with CTMCs that had around 30 million reachable states and 75 million transitions, and we concluded that the current definition used in the balloon system is inadequate in terms of performance.