Towards an automated reverse engineering of design models from trace recordings

Abstract

Recording traces from an embedded system is a common procedure in the process of developing real-time systems. While this technique is generally used for debugging and performance analysis, the recordings contain much more information. These pieces of information however can be useful to generate or maintain a system model in an automated manner. Therefore, the goal is to develop an approach that creates a model of a real-time system, especially of its observed temporal behaviour, from events logged in a trace recording. This research aims to extract, analyse and deduce information about the system under observation from a limited view of the proceedings in the system. Also as a consequence of this intention a detailed specification on events necessary for specific use cases emerges. To achieve all this, an iterative approach consisting of three consecutive steps is proposed. At first the necessary algorithms will be developed on a model-based foundation utilising a discrete event simulation. In a next step, the implementation will be aligned to take also specifics of the execution on real hardware into account. Finally, the approach can be evaluated on hardware with examples from real life.