Early stage interference checking for automatic design space exploration of mixed critical systems

Significant improvements have been made to support the design of mixed-critical systems by developing predictable computing platforms and mechanisms for temporal and spatial segregation between applications of different criticalities sharing the same computing platform. However the design of such Multi-Processor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs) supporting mixed-critical applications needs methodologies and tools to improve the analyzability regarding system configuration and application mapping. Among the required techniques, in this work we focus on the possibility to identify, at the early stages of the design, possible unexpected interactions among tasks relying to different criticalities. In particular, we introduce a dependency check tool to automatically find possible interactions between tasks during the design of a mixed critical embedded system. The proposed tool searches on an abstract system model for the possible interactions, thus helping pruning all the design configurations not respecting the considered criticality constraints. In this way the methodology can be used to speed-up the following design space exploration phase based on functional models (e.g. simulation based) avoiding costly evaluations. Even if the methodology is general, up to now only the timing aspect has been fully modeled and developed, so this paper will focus on this aspect.