Realizing EQL Programs for Bounded-Time Excution

Predicting programs' response time (the longest execution time) has been a challenging task, especially for rule-based programs, in which the control flows are not obvious. To facilitate our study on this problem, we chose the EQL language as our target rule-based language. An EQL program can be thought of as an operator in a prototype system description language such as PSDL. In this paper we show how to generate executable code from an EQL rule-based program and to verify its timing behavior. We have developed a suite of packages to derive response-time bounds for EQL programs. Such timing analysis tools can be used in timing verification for program prototypes in the early stage of software development. The response-time bounds are derived in three steps: First an EQL program is translated into an equivalent C program, which can then be compiled for execution. The translated C program is also used as input to a timing-analysis tool to get execution time information for each rule firing. To derive a response-time bound of the program, the EQL program and the rules' firing-time information are used by a response-time analyzer. In this paper we describe the functionalities of these packages, with emphasis on the EQL-to-C translation. An EQL program example is also used throughout this paper to demonstrate the procedures.