Search-based execution-time verification in object-oriented and component-based real-time system development

Execution time analysis is an essential verification activity during real-time system construction. This activity can be performed dynamically through search-based analysis techniques such as evolutionary algorithms. Evolutionary algorithms have already been successfully used for execution-time analysis under the traditional procedural development paradigm. This paper describes a first attempt in making search-based execution-time analysis techniques also applicable under the more recent object-oriented and component-based software development paradigms. Here, their application is more difficult compared with the traditional procedural development approaches because object-based architectures are inherently encapsulated, and they often represent state machines. This work proposes a solution that makes search techniques applicable in real-time system development with object technology. It is based on in-built testing artefacts and on the execution and optimisation of an object's invocation history through a genetic algorithm. We demonstrate the applicability of the technique through a simple object-oriented real-time system.