The design of safe automotive embedded systems - Some problems, solutions and open issues

International audienceFrom the last decade, the number of software based systems embedded in a car increases every year. The reasons for this evolution are economical as well as technological. On the one hand, this situation is the result of the decreasing cost of hardware components, their increasing reliability and performances and the emergence of embedded fieldbuses; on the other hand, software technology makes easier and less costly the introduction of new functions. Formerly confined to functionalities such as engine or chassis control, this evolution now affects all car domains: wipers, door controls, lights, air condition, braking assistance, multimedia, etc. In the future, even critical functions, as for example, braking or steering, will be fully controlled by electronic systems leading to the X-by-Wire concept. The realization of such systems is obtained through a complex cooperative development process shared by several actors, in particular, OEM (carmakers) and tier-1 suppliers. Furthermore, it's no longer possible to study each system as a stand-alone one and all the partners involved in the design of these systems have to observe a global and common view of the whole embedded architecture. In this context, the main challenge is nowadays to provide means for an efficient development of a safe and optimal embedded system. In this presentation, we will focus on some keywords whose impact and meaning may look antagonist. For example, component, modularity and reusability are recurrent concepts aiming to increase the efficiency of a development while reducing its length. Nevertheless, these principles can be opposed to safety, reliability, dependability purposes. Indeed, the verification of these required properties have to be done on the whole system and not only on a single component. Therefore, we have to complete these first concepts and to introduce the notion of composition of components and moreover of interoperability of components. We will show how this composition can be described through a reference model of embedded architecture that provides on the one hand a standard embedded middleware and on the other hand, an architecture description language. Then, we will focus on the verification of safety/dependability properties and identify which kind of activities they can require and how these activities are related to the first point

Integrated Design and Implementation of Embedded Control Systems with Scilab

Embedded systems are playing an increasingly important role in control engineering. Despite their popularity, embedded systems are generally subject to resource constraints and it is therefore difficult to build complex control systems on embedded platforms. Traditionally, the design and implementation of control systems are often separated, which causes the development of embedded control systems to be highly time-consuming and costly. To address these problems, this paper presents a low-cost, reusable, reconfigurable platform that enables integrated design and implementation of embedded control systems. To minimize the cost, free and open source software packages such as Linux and Scilab are used. Scilab is ported to the embedded ARM-Linux system. The drivers for interfacing Scilab with several communication protocols including serial, Ethernet, and Modbus are developed. Experiments are conducted to test the developed embedded platform. The use of Scilab enables implementation of complex control algorithms on embedded platforms. With the developed platform, it is possible to perform all phases of the development cycle of embedded control systems in a unified environment, thus facilitating the reduction of development time and cost.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures; Open Access at http://www.mdpi.org/sensors/papers/s8095501.pd

Context-aware adaptation in DySCAS

DySCAS is a dynamically self-configuring middleware for automotive control systems. The addition of autonomic, context-aware dynamic configuration to automotive control systems brings a potential for a wide range of benefits in terms of robustness, flexibility, upgrading etc. However, the automotive systems represent a particularly challenging domain for the deployment of autonomics concepts, having a combination of real-time performance constraints, severe resource limitations, safety-critical aspects and cost pressures. For these reasons current systems are statically configured. This paper describes the dynamic run-time configuration aspects of DySCAS and focuses on the extent to which context-aware adaptation has been achieved in DySCAS, and the ways in which the various design and implementation challenges are met

Model based code generation for distributed embedded systems

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex and more distributed. Cost and quality requirements necessitate reuse of the functional software components for multiple deployment architectures. An important step is the allocation of software components to hardware. During this process the differences between the hardware and application software architectures must be reconciled. In this paper we discuss an architecture driven approach involving model-based techniques to resolve these differences and integrate hardware and software components. The system architecture serves as the underpinning based on which distributed real-time components can be generated. Generation of various embedded system architectures using the same functional architecture is discussed. The approach leverages the following technologies – IME (Integrated Modeling Environment), the SAE AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language), and Ocarina. The approach is illustrated using the electronic throttle control system as a case study

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India