Approximating the Worst-Case Execution Time of Soft Real-Time Applications

Real-time schedulers need an estimation of the worst-case execution time (i.e., the longest possible run time) of each process to guarantee that all the deadlines will be met. In addition to be necessary to guarantee the correctness of soft- and hard-real-time systems, the worst-case execution time is also useful in multimedia systems where it can be used to better distribute the computing resources among the processes by adapting the quality of service to the current system load. This dissertation presents a set of static compile-time analyses to estimate the worst-case execution time of Java processes focusing on the approximation of the WCET of fairly large soft-real-time applications on modern hardware systems.