CSP channels for CAN-bus connected embedded control systems

Closed loop control system typically contains multitude of sensors and actuators operated simultaneously. So they are parallel and distributed in its essence. But when mapping this parallelism to software, lot of obstacles concerning multithreading communication and synchronization issues arise. To overcome this problem, the CT kernel/library based on CSP algebra has been developed. This project (TES.5410) is about developing communication extension to the CT library to make it applicable in distributed systems. Since the library is tailored for control systems, properties and requirements of control systems are taken into special consideration. Applicability of existing middleware solutions is examined. A comparison of applicable fieldbus protocols is done in order to determine most suitable ones and CAN fieldbus is chosen to be first fieldbus used. Brief overview of CSP and existing CSP based libraries is given. Middleware architecture is proposed along with few novel ideas

DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability

The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

QoS and security-aware task assignment and scheduling in real-time systems

Security issues in mission-critical real-time systems (e.g., command and control systems) are becoming increasingly important as there are growing needs for satisfying information assurance in these systems. In such systems, it is important to guarantee real-time deadlines along with the security requirements (e.g., confidentiality, integrity, and availability) of the applications. Traditionally, resource management in real-time systems has focused on meeting deadlines along with satisfying fault-tolerance and/or resource constraints. Such an approach is inadequate to accommodate security requirements into resource management algorithms. Based on the imprecise computation paradigm, a task can have several Quality of Service (QoS) levels, higher QoS result incurs higher computational cost. Similarly, achieving a higher level of confidentially requires stronger encryption, which incurs higher computational cost. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff between schedulability of the tasks on the one hand, and the accuracy (QoS) and security of the results produced on the other hand. This tradeoff must be carefully accounted in the resource management algorithms. In this context, this dissertation makes the following contributions: (i) formulation of scheduling problems accounting both deadline and security requirements of workloads in real-time systems, (ii) development of novel task allocation and scheduling algorithms for such workloads, (iii) and evaluation of the results through simulation studies and a limited test evaluations in one case. In particular, the following are the three key contributions. Firstly, the problem of scheduling a set of non-preemptable real-time tasks with security and QoS requirements with the goal of maximizing integrated QoS and security of the system is addressed. This problem is formulated as MILP, and then its complexity is proved to be NP-hard. An online efficient heuristic algorithm is developed as the problem is NP-hard. Simulation studies for a wide range of workload scenarios showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms a set of baseline algorithms. Further, the proposed algorithm\u27s performance is close to the optimal solution in a specific special case of the problem. Secondly, a static assignment and scheduling of a set of dependent real-time tasks, modeled as Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), with security and QoS requirements in heterogeneous real-time system with the objective of maximizing Total Quality Value (TQV) of the system is studied. This problem is formulated as MINLP. Since this problem is NP-hard, a heuristic algorithm to maximize TQV while satisfying the security constraint of the system is developed. The proposed algorithm was evaluated through extensive simulation studies and compared to a set of baseline algorithms for variations of synthetic workloads. The proposed algorithm outperforms the baseline algorithms in all the simulated conditions for fully-connected and shared bus network topologies. Finally, the problem of dynamic assignment and scheduling of a set of dependent tasks with QoS and security requirements in heterogeneous distributed system to maximize the system TQV is addressed. Two heuristic algorithms to maximize TQV of the system are proposed because the problem is NP-hard. The proposed algorithms were evaluated by extensive simulation studies and by a test experiment in InfoSpher platform. The proposed algorithms outperform the baseline algorithms in most of the simulated conditions for fully-connected and shared bus network topologies