Abstract

This paper describes the basic characteristics of MAST, a Modeling and Analysis Suite for Real-Time Applications. It is an environment that offers an open set of tools for modeling, analysis and design of real-time systems that is not oriented to any concrete design methodology. The MAST suite provides components for modeling the hardware resources like processors, networks, devices, or timers, and software resources like threads, processes, servers, or drivers, that constitute the platform of the system; the logical components of the application, i.e., classes, methods, or procedures, and synchronization primitives like mutexes, semaphores, or monitors; and finally the real-time situations that describe the system workload and the timing requirements that correspond to a particular execution mode. This model allows a very rich description of the system, including the effects of event- or message-based synchronization, multiprocessor and distributed architectures, as well as shared resource synchronization. A system representation using this model is analyzable through a set of tools that has been developed within the MAST suite, including worst-case schedulability analysis for hard timing requirements, and through future tools such as a discrete-event simulation for soft timing requirements. Likewise, the suite provides a set of software libraries for managing the model, building new analysis and design tools and storing and displaying the results generated with them. Also high-level UML-based representation techniques have been developed and are shown briefly.

Citations