A Few What-Ifs on Using Statistical Analysis of Stochastic Simulation Runs to Extract Timeliness Properties

Modern real-time systems, with a more flexible and adaptive nature, demand approaches for timeliness evaluation based on probabilistic measures of meeting deadlines. In this context, simulation can emerge as an adequate solution to understand and analyze the timing behaviour of actual systems. However, care must be taken with the obtained outputs under the penalty of obtaining results with lack of credibility. Particularly important is to consider that we are more interested in values from the tail of a probability distribution (near worst-case probabilities), instead of deriving confidence on mean values. We approach this subject by considering the random nature of simulation output data. We will start by discussing well known approaches for estimating distributions out of simulation output, and the confidence which can be applied to its mean values. This is the basis for a discussion on the applicability of such approaches to derive confidence on the tail of distributions, where the worst-case is expected to be.