ConpathView: A visualization tool for debugging race conditions in event synchronization of ARINC 653 applications

Abstract

ARINC 653 applications using event synchronization may result in behaviors unexpected by the programmers when concurrency errors, such as race conditions, occur due to their non-deterministic executions. The errors can be debugged by means of previous visualization tools, such as System viewer, provided by ARINC 653 IDE. However, these tools do not consider race conditions, which require the programmers to analyze the process state transition considering event synchronization and to ratiocinate the occurrence of accesses to shared resources from source codes. This paper presents a visualization tool, called ConpathView that intuitively shows the aspect of the process execution with race conditions and the accesses to the shared memories based on the event services in ARINC 653 applications. The ConpathView enables to reduce visual complexity as well as to provide effective understanding of the aspect of the process execution. It provides concrete and practical information for debugging ARINC 653 applications by locating the accesses to the shared resources on the source code. ? 2016 SERSC.