Safety Engineering with COTS components

Safety-critical systems are becoming more widespread, complex and reliant on software. Increasingly they are engineered through Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) (Commercial Off The Shelf) components to alleviate the spiralling costs and development time, often in the context of complex supply chains. A parallel increased concern for safety has resulted in a variety of safety standards, with a growing consensus that a safety life cycle is needed which is fully integrated with the design and development life cycle, to ensure that safety has appropriate influence on the design decisions as system development progresses. In this article we explore the application of an integrated approach to safety engineering in which assurance drives the engineering process. The paper re- ports on the outcome of a case study on a live industrial project with a view to evaluate: its suitability for application in a real-world safety engineering setting; its benefits and limitations in counteracting some of the difficulties of safety en- gineering with COTS components across supply chains; and, its effectiveness in generating evidence which can contribute directly to the construction of safety cases

Unification of Safety-Critical Java

International audienceIn response to increasing interest in the use of objectoriented technology for development of safety-critical systems, the new DO-178C guidelines will include supplements to address object-oriented technology, model-driven development, formal methods, and development tool qualification [1]. These supplements correlate well with the emerging safety-critical Java standard. As a portable object-oriented programming language enabling high levels of abstraction, safety-critical Java is an ideal candidate for automatic code generation for programming models. The use of formal methods toprove the absence of certain memory management errors at run time is a critical distinction between safety-critical Java and the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) [2]. And the specialized development tools that facilitate the use of these formal methods will, in the ideal, be qualified so that the results of their analysis can be relied upon as trustworthy safety certification evidence

Range Safety Real-time System for Satellite Launch Vehicle Missions–Testing Methodologies

A real-time system plays a critical role in the range safety decision-making in a satellitelaunch mission. Real-time software, the heart of such systems, is becoming an issue of criticality.Emphasis is being laid on the development of reliable, robust, and operational system. Thispaper purports to delineate prudent testing methodologies implemented to test the real-timesystem

Embedded Program Annotations for WCET Analysis

We present __builtin_ais_annot(), a user-friendly, versatile way to transfer annotations (also known as flow facts) written on the source code level to the machine code level. To do so, we couple two tools often used during the development of safety-critical hard real-time systems, the formally verified C compiler CompCert and the static WCET analyzer aiT. CompCert stores the AIS annotations given via __builtin_ais_annot() in a special section of the ELF binary, which can later be extracted automatically by aiT

Communication Paradigms for High-Integrity Distributed Systems with Hard Real-Time Requirements

The development and maintenance of high-integrity software is very expensive, and a specialized development process is required due to its distinctive characteristics. Namely, safety-critical systems usually execute over a distributed embedded platform with few hardware resources which must provide real-time communication and fault-tolerance. This work discusses the adequate communication paradigms for high-integrity distributed applications with hard real-time requirements, and proposes a restricted middleware based on the current schedulability theory which can be certified and capable to obtain the required predictability and timeliness of this kind of systems

A case study on model checking and deductive verification techniques of safety-critical software

Due to the growing importance of the role that software plays in critical systems, software verification process is required to be rigorous and reliable. It is well-known that test activities cannot detect all the defects in safety-critical real time software systems. One way of complementing the test activities is through formal verification. Two useful formal verification techniques are deductive verification and model checking, which allow programs to be statically checked for defects. This paper explores both techniques, by employing the CBMC and Jessie/Frama-C tools in the context of a safety-critical real time software system.This work is funded by ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-020486

From Java to real-time Java : A model-driven methodology with automated toolchain

Real-time systems are receiving increasing attention with the emerging application scenarios that are safety-critical, complex in functionality, high on timing-related performance requirements, and cost-sensitive, such as autonomous vehicles. Development of real-time systems is error-prone and highly dependent on the sophisticated domain expertise, making it a costly process. There is a trend of the existing software without the real-time notion being re-developed to realise real-time features, e.g., in the big data technology. This paper utilises the principles of model-driven engineering (MDE) and proposes the first methodology that automatically converts standard time-sharing Java applications to real-time Java applications. It opens up a new research direction on development automation of real-time programming languages and inspires many research questions that can be jointly investigated by the embedded systems, programming languages as well as MDE communities