Migration of Legacy Software Towards Correct-by-Construction Timing Behavior

This paper presents an approach for incrementally adjusting the timing behavior of legacy real-time software according to explicit timing specifications expressed in the Timing Definition Language (TDL). The main goals of such a migration are ensuring predictability of the timing behavior, and enabling adaptivity of the system. The latter is particularly important for embedded control systems which adapt their computational load in accordance to parameters of the physical environment in which they operate. Our approach entails a minimal instrumentation of the original code combined with an automatically generated runtime system, which ensures that the executions of designated periodic computations in the legacy software satisfy the logical execution time specifications of the TDL model. The presented approach has been applied to a complex legacy controller system in the automotive domain.

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