Embedded systems in safety-critical environments are continuously required to
deliver more performance and functionality, while expected to provide verified
safety guarantees. Nonetheless, platform-wide software verification (required
for safety) is often expensive. Therefore, design methods that enable
utilization of components such as real-time operating systems (RTOS), without
requiring their correctness to guarantee safety, is necessary.
In this paper, we propose a design approach to deploy safe-by-design embedded
systems. To attain this goal, we rely on a small core of verified software to
handle faults in applications and RTOS and recover from them while ensuring
that timing constraints of safety-critical tasks are always satisfied. Faults
are detected by monitoring the application timing and fault-recovery is
achieved via full platform restart and software reload, enabled by the short
restart time of embedded systems. Schedulability analysis is used to ensure
that the timing constraints of critical plant control tasks are always
satisfied in spite of faults and consequent restarts. We derive schedulability
results for four restart-tolerant task models. We use a simulator to evaluate
and compare the performance of the considered scheduling models