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J. Zwirchmayr, L. Kovacs, J. Knoop, A. Bonenfant, H. Cassé, C. Rochange:
"FFX: A Portable WCET Annotation Language";
Talk: International Conference on Real-Time and Network Systems (RTNS), Abbaye des Premontres, Pont a Mousson, France; 2012-11-08 - 2012-11-09; in: "20th International Conference on Real-Time and Network Systems", ACM, New York (2012), ISBN: 978-1-4503-1409-1; 91 - 100.

In order to ensure safety of critical real-time systems it is
crucial to verify their temporal properties. Such a property
is the Worst-Case Execution Time (WCET), which is ob-
tained by architecture-dependent timing analysis and arch-
itecture-independent flow fact analysis. In this article we
present a WCET annotation language which is able to ex-
press such information originating from the user or the anal-
ysis. The open format, named FFX to stand for Flow Facts
in XML, is portable, expandable and easy to write, under-
stand and process.
We argue that FFX allows to reuse and exchange the an-
notation files among WCET tools. FFX therefore permits
to tighten WCET results and decreases the effort to sup-
port new architectures. Additionally, FFX flow fact files
allow fair comparisons of both flow facts and WCET results.
FFX can be used for quality assurance when developing
new analysis techniques, using it as a flow fact database
to test against. We present a small case study exemplify-
ing the above points. Our case study puts special focus
on the aspect of comparability and information exchange
among WCET tools. In our experiments with FFX, we
use the WCET analysis tool chains Otawa/oRange and r-
TuBound/CalcWCET167.