STARS of MPEG decoder: a case study in worst-case analysis of discrete-event systems

STARS (STatic Analysis of Reactive Systems) is a methodology for worst-case analysis of discrete systems. Theoretical foundations of STARS have been laid down previously but no implementation has been presented so far. We introduce an implementation of STARS as an extension of YAPI, a programming interface used to model signal processing applications as process networks. We apply STARS to a YAPI model of an MPEG decoder. We show that worst-case bounds computed by STARS are quite close to simulated values (within 15%). We also show that additional effort by the designer required to build STARS models is very small compared to effort of building the YAPI simulation model, and that the run times of STARS are negligible compared to the simulation run times.