• What is SymTA/S?
• Why SymTA/S?
• What are typical scheduling problems on electronic control units (ECUs)?
• What are typical scheduling problems on buses?
• What are typical scheduling problems in networked systems?
• How does scheduling analysis compare to simulation, measurement or tracing?

SymTA/S is a comprehensive scheduling analysis and optimization tool suite for electronic control units, buses and networked systems. SymTA/S allows to quickly detect bottlenecks arising from software and system integration, understand and debug deadline overruns, compare alternatives and extensively optimize systems.

Software and system integration have become major causes for quality and reliability problems in electronics systems. A growing number of these problems have roots in faulty timing. SymTA/S combines powerful scheduling analysis and optimization to avoid such integration problems, thereby increasing system reliability and quality, and decreasing cost and design time.

Transient loads can result in tasks or functions missing their deadlines. Such overloads are often an unlucky combination of a large number of interrupts, preemptions by higher priority tasks, blocking and other timing effects.

On buses, overload situations can result from a combination of frame collisions, frame timing jitter and a burst of event driven frames. Messages may then arrive too late, with too much jitter, or not at all.

In networked systems, complexities add up, often in non-intuitive ways. Typical questions concern end-to-end timing, from a sensor connected to one ECU, via a network to an actor connected to a different ECU. A violated end-to-end deadline can fail a distributed function, such as vehicle stability control.

These are complementary techniques that can often be used productively together. The most prominent advantages of SymTA/S, which implements scheduling analysis are

• SymTA/S systematically identifies, verifies and visualizes hard-to-find worst-cases situations.
• SymTA/S can systematically analyze end-to-end timing.
• SymTA/S enables rapid design-space exploration and sensitivity analysis, supporting optimization including 'what-if' analysis.
• SymTA/S can be applied early in the design process before design decisions have been finalized.
• SymTA/S focuses fully on analysis, verification and optimization of performance and timing. Function design and verification can be done by other excellent, established tools.