An Integrated Approach to Scheduling in Safety-Critical Embedded Control Systems

This paper describes an approach that has been developed over a number of years for the job of scheduling systems and providing evidence that timing requirements are met. The approach has been targeted at the safety-critical systems domain, and more specifically the development of control systems for jet engines. The work provides a usable computational model that supports the reuse of legacy systems. In addition, timing analysis has been developed that features low pessimism, low computational complexity and that is robust to change. The contributions of this paper are to show how standard timing analysis is often insufficient for real systems, presenting extensions to the standard analysis to give an integrated approach to verification, and providing a case study that demonstrates the appropriateness and benefits of the overall technique.