Mixed Criticality in Control Systems

The complexity of industrial embedded systems is increasing continuously. Companies try to keep a leading position by offering additional functionalities and services. Systems are to be composed by multiple sensor, actuation and computation subsystems running in a coordinated way on a distributed platform. Due to the increment in processor power, it is possible to allocate a large number of functions in the same platform. This gives rise to mixed-criticality systems, when components with different criticality levels coexist in the same processor. This approach can lead to prohibitive certification costs. A better approach is to rely on partitioned systems, based on a hypervisor that isolates each of the virtual machines in the system. Components with different criticality levels are allocated to different partitions, in order to prevent interferences. The aim of this paper is to introduce mixed-criticality systems, to introduce the most challenging research topics, and to provide some background on the most promising techniques and research activities.