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Short presentation on Rosetta, Virtuoso in bed with Newtion and Gödel. What's in an assumption?

Altreonic has now released a new version of the VirtuosoNext Designer (and RTOS) for Windows. This is a 64bit version and replaces the older OpenComRTOS Win32 version that is no longer fully functional on older Windows platforms. Together with a fully updated API manual, it can be downloaded and installed from the msi file on a Windows PC. Visit the download section.

Contact us for the external toolchain, available from our ftp server

The older OpenComRTOS hereby is deprecated and should no longer be used.

Hubs for VirtuosoNext: Online Verification of Real-Time Coordinators

The paper is a collaborative effort of: Guillermina Cledoua (a), José Proença (b), Bernhard H.C. Sputh (c), Eric Verhulst (c)

(a)HASLab/INESC TEC, Universidade do Minho, Portugal, (b)CISTER, ISEP, Portugal, (c)Altreonic NV, Belgium

Extended version at Zenodo.org
Esevier paper at https://www.sciencedirect.com/

Abstract

VirtuosoNextTM is a distributed real-time operating system (RTOS) fea- turing a generic programming model dubbed Interacting Entities. This pa- per focuses on these interactions, implemented as so-called Hubs. Hubs act as synchronisation and communication mechanisms between the application tasks and implement the services provided by the kernel. While the kernel provides the most basic services, each carefully designed, tested and opti- mised, tasks are limited to this handful of basic hubs, leaving the development of more complex mechanisms up to application specific implementations.

This work presents a toolset that supports the building of new services compositionally, using notions borrowed from the Reo coordination language, on which the developer can delegate coordination-related duties. This toolset uses a formal compositional semantics for hubs that captures dataflow and time, formalising the behaviour of existing hubs, and allowing the defini- tion of new ones. Furthermore, it enables the analysis and verification of hubs under our automata interpretation, including time-sensitive behaviour via the Uppaal model checker, usable on http://arcatools.org/hubs. We illustrate the proposed tools and methods by verifying key properties on different interaction scenarios between tasks and a composed hub.

My presentation was very well received. Of course, the ultimate question was that while ARRL-7 implies an independent supervisory organisation for automotive, the question is how this goal can be reached. Will the sector welcome it and accept the openness it needs (like in the aviation sector)? Nevertheless, I am convinced that it will be needed anyway. The move towards MaaS (vs. a market of vehicles) and safety concerns with ADAS and autonomous driving require it. In general, many presentations were about autonomous driving and especially the use of A.I. (read Machine Learning with Neural Nets). Personally I have doubts. Is this the right tool? And is this even the right problem to solve? These systems now use 1 TFlop (with no redundancy) and clearly the sensors are not yet a match for our eyes.  Maybe 100 TFlop and much  better sensors can give us Level 5. But is it then still worth it? 

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6547831979230978050

Separation of concerns for resilient embedded real-time

Abstract:

Many embedded applications, specifically safety-critical ones, have strict real-time constraints. In the very worst case, missing a deadline can be catastrophic. Therefore, many approaches have been developed and successfully deployed whereby time is explicitly used to schedule the application tasks. A very important design paramater is a guaranteed Worst Case Execution Time (WCET). While this approach can be justified partly for historical reasons but also for reasons of simplicity, modern many-core processors pose a significant challenge as the chips combine multiple tightly coupled processing cores, fast caches to alleviate slow memory and complex peripherals. All these elements result in a statistical execution behaviour whereby a measure like WCET is no longer practical. In this paper we advocate that this situation requires a different approach to programming, i.e. one based on events and concurrency with time no longer being a strict design parameter but rather a consequence of the program execution. It is a consequence of applying a separation of concerns to execution in space and time. Benchmarks obtained with the latest version of VirtuosoNext Designer, a fine-grain partitioning multi-core RTOS, illustrate that this is not only feasible but also with no compromise on the real-time behavior. In the latest implementation this was extended to real-time fault recovery making systems much more resilient than with the traditional approach.

Eric Verhulst, CEO/CTO of Altreonic Kurt.mobi is invited speaker at:

Quality, safety and security for automotive software-based systems

In June 2019 the ninth VDA Automotive SYS Conference hosted by the Association of the German Automotive Industry will take place in Potsdam, Germany. Top-rated keynote speakers, experts and managers from E/E Development and leading service providers are going to share experience and knowledge.

Up to date with the changes in the development of embedded systems in the connected vehicle, the conference focuses on Quality, Safety and Security of modern vehicle electronics. The conference will deal both with technical methods/solutions and management practices with respect to the national and international automotive standards.

Title:

“Towards ARRL-7: safer vehicles for resilient Mobility as a Service”.

Abstract:

Autonomous systems have in the last years forced us to rethink the very notion of safety engineering. Exploring the complete state space be it for formal verification or for extensive testing has become elusive, leaving us with guesswork to estimate the residual error rate. Of course, we just know it is never zero. How to tackle this problem? We start by acknowledging some conceptual weaknesses of the safety standards. Safety standards consider safety engineering as a specific project and domain activity, each with its own SIL levels, which is not only costly but also questionable. Starting from the objective to promote reuse, we define a complementary criterion called ARRL (Assured Reliability and Resilience Level). Rather than starting from the system’s functions, it starts from the system’s architecture in relationship to resilience.  It promotes the notion of resilience to failures as a way to achieve a higher degree of safety and puts Quality of Service first.  Resilience also help to design with less complexity easing the burden of verification and validation. The higher ARRL levels also acknowledge that the system design is never finished and that the loop must be closed at a higher level.

More details at: https://vda-qmc.de/en/software-processes/vda-automotive-sys/

Altreonic Kurt.mobi and Tomen Energy in Shenzhen signed an MOU for a Joint Venture to further develop the market of its game changing battery technology. Based on a patented novel type of carbon based super capacitor, it will make electric vehicles become more like traditional ICE vehicles with fast charging and operating without any problems from -40°C, resp. -20°C to +50°C. No complex Battery Management System and no active cooling is needed. The battery itself remains very cool due to its very low internal resistance and thermal run-away risks are a thing of the past.  The batteries have a very long life time (20000 cycles and more) so that no costly midlife replacements are needed.  Overall, the novel batteries are a significant step for a practical transition to a clean and sustainable electricity driven world. 

In the last couple of years, Altreonic has been setting up a new business units like KURT.mobi entering the market of urban electric mobility and KURT.energy for safe batteries. The KURT vehicle concept fully exploits the advantages and features of our VirtuosoNext Designer with a fully distributed and fault tolerant, fine-grain partitioning RTOS kernel at its core. The GoedelWorks environment is also in use to support the project from early requirements to full implementation.

As these new developments have become the main business objective of Altreonic, the technology is hence only offered as an Open Technology License (see link here) and includes all available documentation, source code, test suites, etc. for all targets supported. This includes a 3 days hands-on training. Porting to new targets / BSPs is possible as an engineering service, as part of an in-depth training in team with the customer. A more in-depth training can be provided upon request. A detailed overview is given below. Note that the software is delievred "as is", essentially a check-out of the svn repository.

Academic institutions and non-profit research organisations can benefit from special conditions. Contact Altreonic.

Altreonic will continue to support existing licensees and maintain the software as needed. Internal developments and extensions will continue droven by our application needs. Altreonic will still make licenses available in the context of customer specific engineering projects.

Interested licensees should contact Altreonic directly for the licensing conditions.

Overview: