Clocks, DBMS and States in Timed Systems
Johan E. Bengtsson · 2002
Today, computers are used to control various technical systems in our society. In many cases, time plays a crucial role in the operation of computers embedded in such systems. This thesis is about techniques and tools for the analysis of timing behaviours of computer systems. Its main contributions are in the development and implementation of UPPAAL, a tool designed to automate the analysis process of systems modelled as timed automata. As the first contribution, we present a software package for timing constraints represented as Difference Bound Matrices. We describe in details, all data-structures and operations for DBMs needed in state-space exploration of timed automata, as well as techniques for efficient imple-mentation. In particular, we have developed two normalisation algorithms to guarantee termina-tion of reachability analysis for timed automata containing constraints on clock differences, that transform DBMs according to not only maximal constants of clocks as in algorithms published in the literature, but also difference constraints appearing in the automata. The second contribu-tion of this thesis is a collection of low level optimisations on the internal data-structures and algorithms of UPPAAL to minimise memory and time consumption. We present compression techniques to allow the state-space of a system to be efficiently stored and manipulated in main