Industrial Application of a Partitioning Scheduler to Support Mixed Criticality Systems

The ever-growing complexity of safety-critical control systems continues to require evolution in control system design, architecture and implementation. At the same time the cost of developing such systems must be controlled and importantly quality must be maintained. This paper examines the application of Mixed Criticality System (MCS) research to a DAL-A aircraft engine Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC) system which includes studying porting the control system’s software to a preemptive scheduler from a non-preemptive scheduler. The paper deals with three key challenges as part of the technology transitions. Firstly, how to provide an equivalent level of fault isolation to ARINC 653 without the restriction of strict temporal slicing between criticality levels. Secondly extending the current analysis for Adaptive Mixed Criticality (AMC) scheduling to include the overheads of the system. Finally the development of clustering algorithms that automatically group tasks into larger super-tasks to both reduce overheads whilst ensuring the timing requirements, including the important task transaction requirements, are met.