aiT Succeeds in the First WCET Tool Challenge

Saarbruecken, Germany — 19 March 2007. AbsInt today announced that its aiT Worst-Case Execution Time Analyzer successfully participated in the WCET Tool Challenge 2006, organized by the University of Mälardalen, Sweden.

Various WCET (Worst-Case Execution Time) tools have been tested and compared in this study sponsored by the ARTIST2 Network of Excellence on Embedded Systems Design. The challenge took place during autumn 2006.

The idea of a WCET Tool Challenge came up during the spring of 2006, inspired by other areas where competitions or similar have been used to be able to discuss and compare different approaches. One of the goals of the WCET Tool Challenge is to exhibit the wide range of timing analysis tools available today. The first Challenge has been performed successfully”, said Dr. Jan Gustafsson, Mälardalen University, Sweden, head of the WCET Tool Challenge Working group.

Different aspects like flow analysis, the required amount of user interaction or the performance of the tools have been evaluated on a large set of test programs. There were two evaluations, an internal evaluation by the WCET Tool Challenge Working group and an external evaluation by an independent person, Lili Tan from the University of Duisburg-Essen.

AbsInt’s worst-case execution time analyzer aiT was the only tool that started for 3 different real processor architectures. It was the only tool that was able to produce results for all test programs. The results of analyses by aiT were in most cases exceptionally precise. Finding in the challenge was, amongst others, that aiT allows for user-friendly WCET analysis, advises against unrealistic annotations, and provides tight WCET values.

  • aiT was able to handle every kind of benchmark and every test program that was tested in the Challenge. aiT is able to support WCET analysis even for complex processors. […] aiT demonstrates its leading position through all its features, which contribute to its position as an industry-strength tool, satisfying the requirements from industry as posed by EADS Airbus and proven by the accomplishment in various projects.”

    WCET Tool Challenge 2006 Final Report

The results of the WCET Tool Challenge have been presented at the ISoLA conference in November 2006. The full report is available at http://dc.uni-due.de/org/all/former/Tan/all/.

The results of the first WCET Tool Challenge demonstrate the outstanding position of AbsInt’s technology in timing analysis”, said Dr. Christian Ferdinand, CEO of AbsInt.

About AbsInt

AbsInt provides advanced development tools for embedded systems, and tools for validation, verification and certification of safety-critical software. Founded in 1998, the company is located in Saarbruecken, Germany, and currently has a 28-strong team.

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