Two Ways to See the Future: Combining Prediction and Future-Offset Accesses in RTLola

Abstract

RTLola is a stream-based specification language designed for asynchronous real-time systems. While many temporal specifications naturally refer to future behavior, RTLola currently offers no mechanism to express such future-dependent properties. In this paper, we extend RTLola with two complementary mechanisms to reason about the future. First, we introduce a prediction operator that extrapolates future stream values at arbitrary timestamps based on past observations. Second, we add a discrete future offset operator, which provides access to precise future values by delaying the evaluation of the dependent stream expressions. While the former enables immediate, but possibly imprecise predictions, the latter ensures exact values once the required information becomes available. We formalize both extensions in the RTLola semantics and evaluate their implementation on runtime and memory consumption.