Specification and analysis of real-time systems with PARAGON

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology for the specification and analysis of distributed real-time systems using the toolset called PARAGON. PARAGON is based on the Communicating Shared Resources paradigm, which allows a real-time system to be modeled as a set of communicating processes that compete for shared resources. PARAGON supports both visual and textual languages for describing real-time systems. It offers automatic analysis based on state space exploration as well as user-directed simulation. Our experience with using PARAGON in several case studies resulted in a methodology that includes design patterns and abstraction heuristics, as well as an overall process. This paper briefly overviews the communicating shared resource paradigm and its toolset PARAGON, including the textual and visual specification languages. The paper then describes our methodology with special emphasis on heuristics that can be used in PARAGON to reduce the state space. To illustrate the methodology, we use examples from a real-life system case study.