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An industrial view on the common academic understanding of mixed-criticality systems

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Abstract

With the rapid evolution of commercial hardware platforms, in most application domains, the industry has shown a growing interest in integrating and running independently-developed applications of different “criticalities” in the same multi-core platform, with the objective of improving the performance/cost ratio of the system. Such integrated systems are commonly referred to as mixed-criticality systems (MCS). Most of the MCS-related research published in the state-of-the-art cite the safety-related standards associated to each application domain (e.g. aeronautics, space, railway, automotive). However, those standards are not, in most cases, freely available, and do not always clearly and explicitly specify the requirements for mixed-criticality systems. This paper addresses the important challenge of presenting the relevant information available in some of the safety-related standards, such that the mixed-criticality concept is understood from an industrialist’s perspective. In addition, the paper evaluates state-of-the-art mixed-criticality real-time scheduling models and algorithms against the safety-related standards.

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Notes

  1. Note that in Sect. 2.2 other terminologies used in other domains will be presented.

  2. A detailed description of these 3 parameters are outside the scope of this work. Please refer to ISO26262 (2011) for further details.

  3. In addition to the four ASILs, the class QM (quality management) denotes no requirement to comply with ISO26262 other than the project quality assurance requirements.

  4. ECU: Electronic Control Unit

  5. S3: life-threatening injuries (survival uncertain), fatal injuries;

  6. E4: high probability;

  7. C2: normally controllable;

  8. C3: difficult to control or uncontrollable.

  9. http://www.time-rover.com.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported by National Funds through FCT/MEC (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) and when applicable, co-financed by ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) under the PT2020 Partnership, within Project UID/CEC/04234/2013 (CISTER Research Centre); also by, FCT/MEC and the EU ARTEMIS JU within projects ARTEMIS/0003/2012—JU Grant nr. 333053 (CONCERTO) and ARTEMIS/0001/2013—JU Grant nr. 621429(EMC2); and also by the Portuguese National Innovation Agency (ANI) under the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) through COMPETE (Operational Programme ’Thematic Factors of Competitiveness’), within project V-SIS, QREN—SI I&DT nr. 38923.

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Esper, A., Nelissen, G., Nélis, V. et al. An industrial view on the common academic understanding of mixed-criticality systems. Real-Time Syst 54, 745–795 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-018-9308-9

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