mixed-criticality

Modern embedded applications already integrate a multitude of functionalities with potentially different criticality levels into a single system and this trend is expected to grow in the near future. Further, Europe is facing a once in a lifetime challenge with the advent of high-performance processors like multicores and the potential to integrate in a single platform systems with different levels of dependability and security, known as mixed-criticality systems. Without appropriate preconditions, the integration of mixed-criticality subsystems based on heterogeneous high-performance processors can lead to a significant and potentially unacceptable increase of engineering and certification costs.

MIXED-CRITICALITY FORUM

The goal of the Mixed-Criticality Forum (MCF) is to provide access to selected project results for the community. Targeted members of the community are (a) component developers that have a real interest and incentives for developing components initially based on the results produced in projects related to mixed-criticality systems (e.g., tools, platform components); and (b) community of application developers that use the resulting architecture for safety-critical applications.

Organizations from both the research and the industrial side are offered various benefits in the participation in the community (i.e. to join and use the achieved results) in order to facilitate uptake of these results.

The MCF furthermore provides a forum for stakeholders and community members to interactively develop and discuss the innovation roadmap for mixed-criticality systems of the future.

The community platform aims to make available project results and also facilitate sharing, discussion and further development on the platform, focusing on:

  • Meta-models for application and platform modelling
  • Virtualization components (e.g., extended network interfaces, resource managers)
  • Simulation environment
  • Tool support
  • Documentation and training material

For further information visit: mixedcriticalityforum.org

MIXED-CRITICALITY CLUSTER

 

The European Mixed-Criticality Cluster (MCC) was initiated by three EU FP7 projects CONTREX, DREAMS and PROXIMA. After CONTREX and PROXIMA finished in late 2016, in the MCC, the DREAMS and the SAFEPOWER projects collaborated and closely worked together in terms of identification of future challenges in the design and development of mixed-criticality multicore systems, join dissemination activities, and where possible exploring techniques to cover those challenges. Since SAFEPOWER finished in 2019, till the start of UP2DATE in 2020, partners involved in MCC have collaborated in the organization of new Mixed-Criticality workshops.

In addition to the MCC there are several ongoing research initiatives studying mixed-criticality integration in multicore processors including the SELENE, SAFE4RAIL and SAFE4RAIL2 project.
Some of the key challenges to be tackled include the combination of software virtualization and hardware segregation and the extension of partitioning mechanisms jointly addressing significant extra-functional requirements (e.g., time, energy and power budgets, adaptivity, reliability, safety, security, volume, weight, etc.) along with development, updating mechanisms and certification methodology.

  • Timing: the foundations for enabling integrated mixed-criticality multicores systems are mechanisms for temporal and spatial partitioning, which establish fault containment and the absence of unintended side effects between functions.
  • Certification: certification is key to enable exploitation of results in certain application domains such as railways or automotive.
  • Extra-functional properties: the specific properties that must be satisfied by embedded systems include timeliness, energy efficiency of battery-operated devices, dependable operation in safety-relevant scenarios, updating mechanisms, short time-to-market and low cost in addition to increasing requirements with respect to functionality.
  • Development methods: state-of-the-art model-based design methods still lack of explicit support for modelling mixed-criticality of applications. Support for spatial and temporal segregation properties at the resource allocation or platform view and for the static or dynamic application to computation, memory and communication resource mapping is required.