Schedulability Analysis of MSC-Based System Models

Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are widely used for describing interaction scenarios between the components of a distributed system. Consequently, worst case response time estimation and schedulability analysis of MSC-based specifications form natural building blocks for designing distributed real-time systems. However, currently there exists a large gap between the timing and quantitative performance analysis techniques that exist in the real-time systems literature, and the modeling/specification techniques that are advocated by the formal methods community. As a result, although a number of schedulability analysis techniques are known for a variety of task graph-based models, it is not clear if they can be used to effectively analyze standard specification formalisms such as MSCs.