Safe implementation of mixed-criticality applications in multicore platforms: A model-based design approach

Abstract

Application complexity in safety-critical systems is currently creating an immediate need to employ new model-based approaches to ensure system’s safe operation in high performances. At the same time, hardware evolution through multicore and hybrid architectures, while serving performance requirements, has not been realized as a safe and technology-ready solution to be employed in critical domains. In this paper, we report our experiences on the development of a model-based design workflow for safety assurance in mixed-critical applications executed on multicore platforms. Starting from our application specification, we develop intermediate models and extract configuration parameters that help us define a task optimization problem. Tasks composing the application will be weighted according to their criticality degree, allowing us to solve an optimization problem for safe resource and time partitioning at the available multicore resources. Based on code-generation techniques, we automatically generate an optimal and safe schema to be implemented in a real-time operating system, safeguarding the multicore resources from errors while executing the tasks. Indicative results are being presented by a prototype tool developed for a case study while we reason about the applicability of the approach.