2011
By Dionisio de Niz
Senior Member of the Technical Staff,
Research, Technology, and System Solutions
Cyber-physical systems (CPS)
are characterized by close interactions between software components and
physical processes. These interactions can have life-threatening
consequences when they include safety-critical functions that are not
performed according to their time-sensitive requirements. For example,
an airbag must fully inflate within 20 milliseconds (its deadline) of an
accident to prevent the driver from hitting the steering wheel with
potentially fatal consequences. Unfortunately, the competition of
safety-critical requirements with other demands to reduce the cost,
power consumption, and device size also create problems, such as
automotive recalls, new aircraft delivery delays, and plane accidents.
Our research leverages the fact that failing to meet deadlines doesn’t
always have the same level of criticality for all functions. For
instance, if a music player fails to meet its deadlines the sound
quality may be compromised, but lives are not threatened. Systems whose
functions have different criticalities are known as mixed criticality
systems. This blog posting updates our earlier post to describe the latest results of our research on supporting mixed-criticality operations by giving more central processing unit (CPU) time to functions with higher value while ensuring critical timing guarantees.
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