Compositional Schedulability Analysis of Hierarchical Real-Time Systems

Embedded systems are complex as a whole but consist of smaller independent modules interacting with each other. This structure makes them amenable to compositional design. Real-time embedded systems consist of realtime workloads having deadlines. Compositional design of such systems can be done using real-time components arranged in a scheduling hierarchy. Each component consists of some real-time workload and a scheduling policy for the workload. To simplify schedulability analysis for such systems, analysis should be done compositionally using interfaces that abstract timing requirement of components. To facilitate analysis of dynamically changing systems, the framework should also support incremental analysis. In this paper, we overview our approach to compositional and incremental schedulability analysis of hierarchical real-time systems. We describe a compositional analysis technique that abstracts resource requirement of components using periodic resource models. To support incremental analysis and resource bandwidth minimization, we describe an extension to this interface model. Each extended interface consists of multiple periodic resource models for different periods. This allows the selection of a periodic model that can schedule the system using minimum bandwidth. We also account for context switch overhead of components in these extended interfaces. We then describe an associative composition technique for such interfaces, that supports incremental analysis

Compositional Analysis of Real-Time Embedded Systems

This tutorial is concerned with various aspects of component-based design and compositional analysis of real-time embedded systems. It will first give an overview of component-based frameworks and their underlying principles. It will then go in-depth into abstraction methods for real-time components and techniques for computing their optimal interfaces, for both systems implemented on uniprocessor and multiprocessor platforms, as well as extensions to multi-mode systems. Besides theoretical aspects, the tutorial will also present an implementation of the compositional analysis framework on Xen virtualization and a demonstration of the CARTS toolset with several examples seeing the techniques in action. It will also include two case studies highlighting the utility of the framework, including the ARINC-653 avionics software and a smart-phone application. We will conclude the tutorial with a number of open challenges and research opportunities in this domain

A compositional monitoring framework for hard real-time systems

Runtime Monitoring of hard real-time embedded systems is a promising technique for ensuring that a running system respects timing constraints, possibly combined with faults originated by the software and/or hardware. This is particularly important when we have real-time embedded systems made of several components that must combine different levels of criticality, and different levels of correctness requirements. This paper introduces a compositional monitoring framework coupled with guarantees that include time isolation and the response time of a monitor for a predicted violation. The kind of monitors that we propose are automatically generated by synthesizing logic formulas of a timed temporal logic, and their correctness is ensured by construction.This work was partially supported by National Funds through FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) and by ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) through COMPETE (Operational Programme ’Thematic Factors of Competitiveness’), within projects Ref. FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-022701 (CISTER), FCOMP-01-0124- FEDER-015006 (VIPCORE) and FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-020486 (AVIACC)

Designing Bandwidth-Efficient Stabilizing Control Servers

Guaranteeing stability of control applications in embedded systems, or cyber-physical systems, is perhaps the alpha and omega of implementing such applications. However, as opposed to the classical real-time systems where often the acceptance criterion is meeting the deadline, control applications do not primarily enforce hard deadlines. In the case of control applications, stability is considered to be the main design criterion and can be expressed in terms of the amount of delay and jitter a control application can tolerate before instability. Therefore, new design and analysis techniques are required for embedded control systems. In this paper, the analysis and design of such systems considering server-based resource reservation mechanism are addressed. The benefits of employing servers are manifold: (1) providing a compositional framework, (2) protection against other tasks misbehaviors, and (3) systematic bandwidth assignment. We propose a methodology for designing bandwidth-efficient servers to stabilize control tasks

Analytic real-time analysis and timed automata: a hybrid methodology for the performance analysis of embedded real-time systems

This paper presents a compositional and hybrid approach for the performance analysis of distributed real-time systems. The developed methodology abstracts system components by either flow-oriented and purely analytic descriptions or by state-based models in the form of timed automata. The interaction among the heterogeneous components is modeled by streams of discrete events. In total this yields a hybrid framework for the compositional analysis of embedded systems. It supplements contemporary techniques for the following reasons: (a) state space explosion as intrinsic to formal verification is limited to the level of isolated components; (b) computed performance metrics such as buffer sizes, delays and utilization rates are not overly pessimistic, because coarse-grained analytic models are used only for components that conform to the stateless model of computation. For demonstrating the usefulness of the presented ideas, a corresponding tool-chain has been implemented. It is used to investigate the performance of a two-staged computing system, where one stage exhibits state-dependent behavior that is only coarsely coverable by a purely analytic and stateless component abstraction. Finally, experiments are performed to ascertain the scalability and the accuracy of the proposed approac

Cache-Aware Real-Time Virtualization

Virtualization has been adopted in diverse computing environments, ranging from cloud computing to embedded systems. It enables the consolidation of multi-tenant legacy systems onto a multicore processor for Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) benefits. In order to be adopted in timing-critical systems, virtualization must provide real-time guarantee for tasks and virtual machines (VMs). However, existing virtualization technologies cannot offer such timing guarantee. Tasks in VMs can interfere with each other through shared hardware components. CPU cache, in particular, is a major source of interference that is hard to analyze or manage. In this work, we focus on challenges of the impact of cache-related interferences on the real-time guarantee of virtualization systems. We propose the cache-aware real-time virtualization that provides both system techniques and theoretical analysis for tackling the challenges. We start with the challenge of the private cache overhead and propose the private cache-aware compositional analysis. To tackle the challenge of the shared cache interference, we start with non-virtualization systems and propose a shared cache-aware scheduler for operating systems to co-allocate both CPU and cache resources to tasks and develop the analysis. We then investigate virtualization systems and propose a dynamic cache management framework that hierarchically allocates shared cache to tasks. After that, we further investigate the resource allocation and analysis technique that considers not only cache resource but also CPU and memory bandwidth resources. Our solutions are applicable to commodity hardware and are essential steps to advance virtualization technology into timing-critical systems

Real-Time Virtualization and Cloud Computing

In recent years, we have observed three major trends in the development of complex real-time embedded systems. First, to reduce cost and enhance flexibility, multiple systems are sharing common computing platforms via virtualization technology, instead of being deployed separately on physically isolated hosts. Second, multi-core processors are increasingly being used in real-time systems. Third, developers are exploring the possibilities of deploying real-time applications as virtual machines in a public cloud. The integration of real-time systems as virtual machines (VMs) atop common multi-core platforms in a public cloud raises significant new research challenges in meeting the real-time latency requirements of applications. In order to address the challenges of running real-time VMs in the cloud, we first present RT-Xen, a novel real-time scheduling framework within the popular Xen hypervisor. We start with single-core scheduling in RT-Xen, and present the first work that empirically studies and compares different real-time scheduling schemes on a same platform. We then introduce RT-Xen 2.0, which focuses on multi-core scheduling and spanning multiple design spaces, including priority schemes, server schemes, and scheduling policies. Experimental results demonstrate that when combined with compositional scheduling theory, RT-Xen can deliver real-time performance to an application running in a VM, while the default credit scheduler cannot. After that, we present RT-OpenStack, a cloud management system designed to support co-hosting real-time and non-real-time VMs in a cloud. RT-OpenStack studies the problem of running real-time VMs together with non-real-time VMs in a public cloud. Leveraging the resource interface and real-time scheduling provided by RT-Xen, RT-OpenStack provides real-time performance guarantees to real-time VMs, while achieving high resource utilization by allowing non-real-time VMs to share the remaining CPU resources through a novel VM-to-host mapping scheme. Finally, we present RTCA, a real-time communication architecture for VMs sharing a same host, which maintains low latency for high priority inter-domain communication (IDC) traffic in the face of low priority IDC traffic

On properties of modeling control software for embedded control applications with CSP/CT framework

This PROGRESS project (TES.5224) traces a design framework for implementing embedded real-time software for control applications by exploiting its natural concurrency. The paper illustrates the stage of yielded automation in the process of structuring complex control software architectures, modeling controlled mechatronic systems and designing corresponding control laws, simulating them, generating control code out of simulated control strategy and implementing the software system on a (embedded) computer. The gap between the development of control strategies and the procedures of implementing them on chosen hardware targets is going to be overcome

Graphical modelling language for spycifying concurrency based on CSP

Introduced in this (shortened) paper is a graphical modelling language for specifying concurrency in software designs. The language notations are derived from CSP and the resulting designs form CSP diagrams. The notations reflect both data-flow and control-flow aspects of concurrent software architectures. These designs can automatically be described by CSP algebraic expressions that can be used for formal analysis. The designer does not have to be aware of the underlying mathematics. The techniques and rules presented provide guidance to the development of concurrent software architectures. One can detect and reason about compositional conflicts (errors in design), potential deadlocks (errors at run-time), and priority inversion problems (performance burden) at a high level of abstraction. The CSP diagram collaborates with objectoriented modelling languages and structured methods

A distributed Real-Time Java system based on CSP

CSP is a fundamental concept for developing software for distributed real time systems. The CSP paradigm constitutes a natural addition to object orientation and offers higher order multithreading constructs. The CSP channel concept that has been implemented in Java deals with single- and multi-processor environments and also takes care of the real time priority scheduling requirements. For this, the notion of priority and scheduling has been carefully examined and as a result it was reasoned that priority scheduling should be attached to the communicating channels rather than to the processes. In association with channels, a priority based parallel construct is developed for composing processes: hiding threads and priority indexing from the user. This approach simplifies the use of priorities for the object oriented paradigm. Moreover, in the proposed system, the notion of scheduling is no longer connected to the operating system but has become part of the application instead