Toward an error handling mechanism for timing errors with Java Pathfinder and Ptolemy II

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. Designing effective error handling systems in an embedded software system is essential for acceptable and reliable functionality in cases of errors and for the recovery from faults. Errors in the error handling system can cause catastrophic failures of the software, lead to mission failures and can endanger human life. We take a principled approach of extending a model of computation (MoC) with timing semantics for embedded systems by an error handling mechanism for timing errors in model-based design. As a apart of the mechanism we use Java PathFinder (JPF), a model checker developed at NASA Ames. This work presents our attempt during a summer project as we use JPF along with the Ptolemy II modeling and simulation framework, developed at UC Berkeley, with the goal of speeding up the design process of a correct and adequate error handling mechanism for timing errors for a model of computation with timing semantics.