Enabling electronic prognostics using thermal data

Prognostics is a process of assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a product from its expected normal operating condition, and then, based on continuous monitoring, predicting the future reliability of the product. By being able to determine when a product will fail, procedures can be developed to provide advanced warning of failures, optimize maintenance, reduce life cycle costs, and improve the design, qualification and logistical support of fielded and future systems. In the case of electronics, the reliability is often influenced by thermal loads, in the form of steady-state temperatures, power cycles, temperature gradients, ramp rates, and dwell times. If one can continuously monitor the thermal loads, in-situ, this data can be used in conjunction with precursor reasoning algorithms and stress-and-damage models to enable prognostics. This paper discusses approaches to enable electronic prognostics and provides a case study of prognostics using thermal data.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

Verification of the Tree-Based Hierarchical Read-Copy Update in the Linux Kernel

Read-Copy Update (RCU) is a scalable, high-performance Linux-kernel synchronization mechanism that runs low-overhead readers concurrently with updaters. Production-quality RCU implementations for multi-core systems are decidedly non-trivial. Giving the ubiquity of Linux, a rare "million-year" bug can occur several times per day across the installed base. Stringent validation of RCU's complex behaviors is thus critically important. Exhaustive testing is infeasible due to the exponential number of possible executions, which suggests use of formal verification. Previous verification efforts on RCU either focus on simple implementations or use modeling languages, the latter requiring error-prone manual translation that must be repeated frequently due to regular changes in the Linux kernel's RCU implementation. In this paper, we first describe the implementation of Tree RCU in the Linux kernel. We then discuss how to construct a model directly from Tree RCU's source code in C, and use the CBMC model checker to verify its safety and liveness properties. To our best knowledge, this is the first verification of a significant part of RCU's source code, and is an important step towards integration of formal verification into the Linux kernel's regression test suite.Comment: This is a long version of a conference paper published in the 2018 Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE

Abordagem de Anotações para o Suporte da Gestão Energética de Software em Modelos AMALTHEA

The automotive industry is continuously introducing innovative software features to provide more efficient, safe, and comfortable solutions. Despite the several benefits to the consumer, the evolution of automotive software is also reflected in several challenges, presenting a growing complexity that hinders its development and integration. The adoption of standards and appropriate development methods becomes essential to meet the requirements of the industry. Furthermore, the expansion of automotive software systems is also driving a considerable growth in the number of electronic components installed in a vehicle, which has a significant impact on the electric energy consumption. Thus, the focus on non-functional energy requirements has become increasingly important. This work presents a study focused on the evolution of automotive software considering the development standards, methodologies, as well as approaches for energy requirements management. We propose an automatic and self-contained approach for the support of energy properties management, adopting the model-based open-source framework AMALTHEA. From the analysis of execution or simulation traces, the energy consumption estimation is provided at a fine-grained level and annotated in AMALTHEA models. Thus, we enable the energy analysis and management of the system throughout the entire lifecycle. Additionally, this solution is in line with the AUTOSAR Adaptive standard, allowing the development of energy management strategies for automatic, dynamic, and adaptive systems.A indústria automotiva encontra-se constantemente a introduzir funcionalidades inovadoras através de software, para oferecer soluções mais eficientes, seguras e confortáveis. Apesar dos diversos benefícios para o consumidor, a evolução do software automóvel também se reflete em diversos desafios, apresentando uma crescente complexidade que dificulta o seu desenvolvimento e integração. Desta forma, a adoção de normas e metodologias adequadas para o seu desenvolvimento torna-se essencial para cumprir os requisitos do setor. Adicionalmente, esta expansão das funcionalidades suportadas por software é fonte de um aumento considerável do número de componentes eletrónicos instalados em automóveis. Consequentemente, existe um impacto significativo no consumo de energia elétrica dos sistemas automóveis, sendo cada vez mais relevante o foco nos requisitos não-funcionais deste domínio. Este trabalho apresenta um estudo focado na evolução do software automotivo tendo em conta os padrões e metodologias de desenvolvimento desta área, bem como abordagens para a gestão de requisitos de energia. Através da adoção da ferramenta AMALTHEA, uma plataforma open-source de desenvolvimento baseado em modelos, é proposta uma abordagem automática e independente para a análise de propriedades energéticas. A partir da análise de traços de execução ou de simulação, é produzida uma estimativa pormenorizada do consumo de energia, sendo esta anotada em modelos AMALTHEA. Desta forma, torna-se possível a análise e gestão energética ao longo de todo o ciclo de vida do sistema. Salienta-se que a solução se encontra alinhada com a norma AUTOSAR Adaptive, permitindo o desenvolvimento de estratégias para a gestão energética de sistemas automáticos, dinâmicos e adaptativos

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

GPU devices for safety-critical systems: a survey

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) devices and their associated software programming languages and frameworks can deliver the computing performance required to facilitate the development of next-generation high-performance safety-critical systems such as autonomous driving systems. However, the integration of complex, parallel, and computationally demanding software functions with different safety-criticality levels on GPU devices with shared hardware resources contributes to several safety certification challenges. This survey categorizes and provides an overview of research contributions that address GPU devices’ random hardware failures, systematic failures, and independence of execution.This work has been partially supported by the European Research Council with Horizon 2020 (grant agreements No. 772773 and 871465), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant PID2019-107255GB, the HiPEAC Network of Excellence and the Basque Government under grant KK-2019-00035. The Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness has also partially supported Leonidas Kosmidis with a Juan de la Cierva Incorporación postdoctoral fellowship (FJCI-2020- 045931-I).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

CONTREX: Design of embedded mixed-criticality CONTRol systems under consideration of EXtra-functional properties

The increasing processing power of today’s HW/SW platforms leads to the integration of more and more functions in a single device. Additional design challenges arise when these functions share computing resources and belong to different criticality levels. CONTREX complements current activities in the area of predictable computing platforms and segregation mechanisms with techniques to consider the extra-functional properties, i.e., timing constraints, power, and temperature. CONTREX enables energy efficient and cost aware design through analysis and optimization of these properties with regard to application demands at different criticality levels. This article presents an overview of the CONTREX European project, its main innovative technology (extension of a model based design approach, functional and extra-functional analysis with executable models and run-time management) and the final results of three industrial use-cases from different domain (avionics, automotive and telecommunication).The work leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2011 under grant agreement no. 611146

Certifications of Critical Systems – The CECRIS Experience

In recent years, a considerable amount of effort has been devoted, both in industry and academia, to the development, validation and verification of critical systems, i.e. those systems whose malfunctions or failures reach a critical level both in terms of risks to human life as well as having a large economic impact.Certifications of Critical Systems – The CECRIS Experience documents the main insights on Cost Effective Verification and Validation processes that were gained during work in the European Research Project CECRIS (acronym for Certification of Critical Systems). The objective of the research was to tackle the challenges of certification by focusing on those aspects that turn out to be more difficult/important for current and future critical systems industry: the effective use of methodologies, processes and tools.The CECRIS project took a step forward in the growing field of development, verification and validation and certification of critical systems. It focused on the more difficult/important aspects of critical system development, verification and validation and certification process. Starting from both the scientific and industrial state of the art methodologies for system development and the impact of their usage on the verification and validation and certification of critical systems, the project aimed at developing strategies and techniques supported by automatic or semi-automatic tools and methods for these activities, setting guidelines to support engineers during the planning of the verification and validation phases