Following the same trend of consumer electronics, safety-critical industries are starting to adopt Over-The-Air Software Updates (OTASU) on their embedded systems. The motivation behind this trend is twofold. On the one hand, OTASU offer several benefits to the product makers and users by improving or adding new functionality and services to the product without a complete redesign. On the other hand, the increasing connectivity trend makes OTASU a crucial cybersecurity demand to download latest security patches. However, the application of OTASU in the safety-critical domain is not free of challenges, specially when considering the dramatic increase of software complexity and the resulting high computing performance demands. This is the mission of UP2DATE, a recently launched project funded within the European H2020 programme focused on new software update architectures for heterogeneous high-performance mixed-criticality systems. This paper gives an overview of UP2DATE and its foundations, which seeks to improve existing OTASU solutions by considering safety, security and availability from the ground up in an architecture that builds around composability and modularity.
Mixed-criticality cyber physical system provides great advantages in terms of cost, dependability, scalability and competitiveness. However, especially due to shared resources, the certification of these kind of systems is still challenging. Furthermore if the power management is integrated in the system, compliance with safety and security is even more complex. This paper presents the safety concept of a railway signalling use-case, considering a mixed-criticality object controller which includes a power management approach. The paper presents a proposal of using degraded modes and a safety/security analysis of low power techniques. The concept has been positively assessed by an independent certification body.
The evolution to next generation embedded systems is shortening the obsolescence period of the underlying hardware. As this happens, software designed for those platforms (a.k.a., legacy code), that might be functionally correct and validated code, may be lost in the architecture and peripheral change unless a retargeting approach is applied. Embedded systems often have real-time computing constraints, therefore, the legacy code retargeting issue directly affects real-time systems. When dealing with real-time legacy code migration, the timing as well as the functional behaviour must be preserved. This article sets the focus on the timing issue, providing a migration path to real-time legacy embedded control applications by integrating a portable timing enforcement mechanism into a machine-adaptable binary translation tool. The proposed timing enforcement solution provides at the same time means for validating the legacy timing behaviour on the new hardware platform using formal timing specifications in the form of contracts.
Precisely timed execution of resource constrained bare-metal applications is difficult, because the embedded software developer usually has to implement and check the timeliness of the executed application through manual interaction with timers or counters. In the scope of this work, we propose a combined timing specification and concept for time annotation and control blocks in C++. Our proposed blocks can be used to measure and profile software block execution time. Furthermore, it can be used to control and enforce the software time behavior at runtime. After the application of these time blocks, a trace-based verification against the block-based timing specification can be performed to obtain evidence on the correct implementation and usage of the time blocks on the target platform. We have implemented our time block concept in a C++ library and tested it on an ARM Cortex A9 bare-metal platform. The combined usage of timing specification and our time block library has been successfully evaluated on a critical flight-control software for a multi-rotor system.
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