Abstract
Reactive real-time systems have to react to external
events within time constraints: Triggered tasks must
execute within deadlines. It is therefore important for
the designers of such systems to analyse the
schedulability of tasks during the design process, as
well as to test the system's response time to events in
an effective manner once it is implemented. This
article explores the use of genetic algorithms to
provide automated support for both tasks. Our main
objective is then to automate, based on the system task
architecture, the derivation of test cases that
maximise the chances of critical deadline misses within
the system; we refer to this testing activity as stress
testing. A second objective is to enable an early but
realistic analysis of tasks' schedulability at design
time. We have developed a specific solution based on
genetic algorithms and implemented it in a tool. Case
studies were run and results show that the tool (1) is
effective at identifying test cases that will likely
stress the system to such an extent that some tasks may
miss deadlines, (2) can identify situations that were
deemed to be schedulable based on standard
schedulability analysis but that, nevertheless, exhibit
deadline misses.
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