Mixed Criticality Systems and Many-Core Platforms

Professor Alan Burns

University of York

An increasingly important trend in the design of real-time and embedded systems is the integration of components with different levels of criticality onto a common hardware platform. At the same time, these platforms are migrating from single cores to multi-cores and, in the future, manycore architectures. Criticality is a designation of the level of assurance against failure needed for a system component.

A mixed criticality system (MCS) is one that has two or more distinct levels (for example safety critical, mission critical and non-critical). Perhaps up to five levels may be identified (see, for example, the IEC 61508, DO-178B,

DO-254 and ISO 26262 standards). In this talk some of the techniques being developed for MCS will be outlined, as will schemes by which the different assuance methods for each criticality level can be exploited to reduce resource usage.

About Professor Alan Burns

Professor Alan Burns is a member of the Department of Computer Science, University of York, U.K. His research interests cover a number of aspects of real-time systems including the assessment of languages for use in the real-time domain, distributed operating systems, mixed criticality systems and the formal specification of scheduling algorithms and implementation strategies. Professor Burns has authored/co-authored 500 papers/reports and books. Many of these are in the real-time area. His teaching activities include courses in Operating Systems and Real-time Systems. In 2009 Professor Burns was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE.

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