Rapita Director to discuss improving execution time optimization at Avionics 2009 (Amsterdam)

Rapita Systems Director, Ian Broster, will be giving a seminar at 14:45 on 11th March at the Avionics 2009 conference, Amsterdam. The seminar is entitled "Case Study: Improving effectiveness of Worst-Case Execution Time optimisation in an avionics system." Optimising real-time systems to meet timing objectives can be a costly task, particularly if it is not clear which parts of the application contribute to the timing behaviour. This presentation will describe how it was possible to identify the hotspots in source code that contributed to the worst-case execution time (WCET) of an avionics application. The Operational Flight Program (OFP) software running on BAe Systems' Hawk Mission Computer consists of hundreds of thousands of lines of Ada. Applying the RapiTime timing analysis toolset to this system identified the hotspots that contributed to the application's WCET. These hotspots accounted for only 1.2% of the total OFP software. Focussing optimisation on these hotspots resulted in a 23% reduction of WCET.