Assurance Benefits of ISO 26262 compliant Microcontrollers for safety-critical Avionics

The usage of complex Microcontroller Units (MCUs) in avionic systems constitutes a challenge in assuring their safety. They are not developed according to the development requirements accepted by the aerospace industry. These Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware components usually target other domains like the telecommunication branch. In the last years MCUs developed in compliance to the ISO 26262 have been released on the market for safety-related automotive applications. The avionic assurance process could profit from these safety MCUs. In this paper we present evaluation results based on the current assurance practice that demonstrates expected assurance activities benefit from ISO 26262 compliant MCUs.Comment: Submitted to SafeComp 2018: http://www.es.mdh.se/safecomp2018

Safety-related challenges and opportunities for GPUs in the automotive domain

GPUs have been shown to cover the computing performance needs of autonomous driving (AD) systems. However, since the GPUs used for AD build on designs for the mainstream market, they may lack fundamental properties for correct operation under automotive's safety regulations. In this paper, we analyze some of the main challenges in hardware and software design to embrace GPUs as the reference computing solution for AD, with the emphasis in ISO 26262 functional safety requirements.Authors would like to thank Guillem Bernat from Rapita Systems for his technical feedback on this work. The research leading to this work has received funding from the European Re-search Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 772773). This work has also been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant TIN2015-65316-P and the HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Jaume Abella has been partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal postdoctoral fellowship number RYC-2013-14717. Carles Hernández is jointly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER funds through grant TIN2014-60404-JIN.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

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

Teacher Evaluator Training & Certification: Lessons Learned From the Measures of Effective Teaching Project

Makes recommendations for the design and implementation of programs to train and certify principals in conducting teacher evaluations, including content, format, and length of training, scoring practice, and criteria for certification tests

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

An experimental Study using ACSL and Frama-C to formulate and verify Low-Level Requirements from a DO-178C compliant Avionics Project

Safety critical avionics software is a natural application area for formal verification. This is reflected in the formal method's inclusion into the certification guideline DO-178C and its formal methods supplement DO-333. Airbus and Dassault-Aviation, for example, have conducted studies in using formal verification. A large German national research project, Verisoft XT, also examined the application of formal methods in the avionics domain. However, formal methods are not yet mainstream, and it is questionable if formal verification, especially formal deduction, can be integrated into the software development processes of a resource constrained small or medium enterprise (SME). ESG, a Munich based medium sized company, has conducted a small experimental study on the application of formal verification on a small portion of a real avionics project. The low level specification of a software function was formalized with ACSL, and the corresponding source code was partially verified using Frama-C and the WP plugin, with Alt-Ergo as automated prover. We established a couple of criteria which a method should meet to be fit for purpose for industrial use in SME, and evaluated these criteria with the experience gathered by using ACSL with Frama-C on a real world example. The paper reports on the results of this study but also highlights some issues regarding the method in general which, in our view, will typically arise when using the method in the domain of embedded real-time programming.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Safety-Critical Systems and Agile Development: A Mapping Study

In the last decades, agile methods had a huge impact on how software is developed. In many cases, this has led to significant benefits, such as quality and speed of software deliveries to customers. However, safety-critical systems have widely been dismissed from benefiting from agile methods. Products that include safety critical aspects are therefore faced with a situation in which the development of safety-critical parts can significantly limit the potential speed-up through agile methods, for the full product, but also in the non-safety critical parts. For such products, the ability to develop safety-critical software in an agile way will generate a competitive advantage. In order to enable future research in this important area, we present in this paper a mapping of the current state of practice based on {a mixed method approach}. Starting from a workshop with experts from six large Swedish product development companies we develop a lens for our analysis. We then present a systematic mapping study on safety-critical systems and agile development through this lens in order to map potential benefits, challenges, and solution candidates for guiding future research.Comment: Accepted at Euromicro Conf. on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications 2018, Prague, Czech Republi