Robust Mixed-Criticality Systems

Certification authorities require correctness and survivability. In the temporal domain this requires a convincing argument that all deadlines will be met under error free conditions, and that when certain defined errors occur the behaviour of the system is still predictable and safe. This means that occasional execution-time overruns should be tolerated and where more severe errors occur levels of graceful degradation should be supported. With mixed-criticality systems, fault tolerance must be criticality aware, i.e. some tasks should degrade less than others. In this paper a quantitative notion of robustness is defined, and it is shown how fixed priority-based task scheduling can be structured to maximise the likelihood of a system remaining fail operational or fail robust (the latter implying that an occasional job may be skipped if all other deadlines are met). Analysis is developed for fail operational and fail robust behaviour, optimal priority ordering is addressed and an experimental evaluation is described. Overall, the approach presented allows robustness to be balanced against schedulability. A designer would thus be able to explore the design space so defined.