certainty

CERTAINTY “Certification of Real Time Applications designed for mixed criticality" is a research project awarded 2.8 Million Euro funding from the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for Research and technology.

Lasting 3 years, CERTAINTY aims to be a key enabler of the certification process for mixed-critical embedded systems featuring functions dependent on information of varying confidence levels. Such a certification process is particularly needed in the avionic, automotive and automation domains, where concurrent functions with real-time and safety-critical requirements are a reality.

The main challenge is that developing time and safety critical solutions becomes even more complex on multi-core platforms as time disturbances, uncertainties, and unreliability are emerging side effects that need to be efficiently handled.

Currently, mixed-critical approaches, developed for mono-processors and relying on a strong segregation and high levels of certification exist, but they are completely inadequate and unable to effectively handle the cause of non-deterministic behaviour on multi-cores.  In addition, the current solution consisting of strong segregation at design time is limited in terms of performances for complex applications that run on integrated architectures (e.g. IMA).  Finally, this approach is challenged in terms of performance/cost ratio by complex applications running on next generation architectures (manycore, multicore).

To meet up this challenge, CERTAINTY brings together a multidisciplinary team with complementary expertise of scientists from the fields of mixed criticality, reliability, modelling, interference analysis and system synthesis, together with leading industrial partners. Refer to the section partners to get further information on our consortium.