Towards assured dynamic configuration of safety-critical embedded systems

Abstract

Assuring systems quality is an inherent part of developing safety-critical embedded systems. Currently, continuous increase of systems complexity, in particular that of software, makes this development challenging. In response, more and more software faults are remaining unidentified at design-time so that changes and maintenance need to be performed at an increased rate. Unfortunately, today's safety-critical systems are not designed to be upgraded or maintained in a seamless way, so that the overhead of performing changes may be considerable, especially when such changes require to re-verify and re-validate the whole system. In this paper, we present an approach to perform software changes in the operation and maintenance phase of the systems lifecycle. Changes are performed dynamically, by replacing parts of software (i.e., software components) with their functionally equal out-of-the-box instances. In order to prevent the impact of changes on systems integrity, we provide a support to model and to analyze the system. The main outcome here is that specific kind of changes can be maintained without adding any development costs. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.