Timing analysis of a middleware-based system

Component-based systems are often constructed with the help of a middleware layer that provides execution semantics for the components. If the implementations of the components use only the middleware services for concurrency, synchronization, and interactions then the analysis of the timing properties of such systems becomes feasible. In this paper we describe a particular middleware (the cFE/cFS from NASA) and introduce a model-based method for the end-to-end, stimulus-to-response timing analysis for systems built using it. The method is based on a timing model that uses Colored Petri Net to model the behavior of applications and the framework. The model is constructed based on the architecture of the application system and the behavior of the components and is analyzed using a state-space analysis tool. The paper gives illustrative examples for the feasibility and scalability of the approach.