GoedelWorks

SAFECOMP, the 31th International Conference on Computer Safety, Reliability and Security, is an annual event covering new trends, technologies and experiences in the areas of safety, security and reliability of critical computer applications. This year, the key theme will be "Virtually safe -- making system safety traceable". 

Altreonic presents its paper "An Unified Meta-Model for Trustworthy Systems Engineering".

Altreonic is releasing a new white paper on trustworthy systems engineering highlighting how a unified approach can help in mastering the complexity. Trustworthy systems require a trustworthy process developing them. The complexity comes from the fact that many interdependent domains and views are involved, including the human factor. But once understood and all dependencies identified, a framework emerges that complements the engineer's experience providing guidance. The rest is mainly applying discipline and working in team. The framework is supported by the GoedelWorks environment.  

Altreonic announces the availability of GoedelWorks* an internet based portal for safety and systems engineering. It is made available under a SaaS (Software As A Service) business model.
Based on a formalised approach, GoedelWorks is a new technology platform for collaborative systems and safety engineering project delivery. Developed for use by global and distributed teams, GoedelWorks is designed to facilitate how people work together to build systems and products, making project delivery more collaborative, productive, and transparent. You can think of GoedelWorks as an extensible framework that dynamically integrates and synchronizes people, processes, and resources associated with systems engineering development projects. From very small chips to large networked systems, GoedelWorks is the platform that facilitates teamwork and project management.

This booklet is the first of the Gödel Series, with the subtitle "Systems Engineering for Smarties". The aim of this series is to explain in a accessible way some important aspects of trustworthy systems engineering with each booklet covering a specific domain.

The first publication is entitled "Trustworthy Systems Engineering with GoedelWorks" and explains the high level framework Altreonic applies to the domain of systems engineering. It discusses a generic model that applies to any process and project development. It explains the 16 necessary but sufficient concepts. This model was applied to the import of the project flow of the ASIL (Automotive Safety Integrity Level) project of Flanders's Drive whereby a common process was developed based on the IEC-61508, IEC-62061, ISO-DIS-26262, ISO-13849, ISO-DIS-25119 and ISO-15998 safety standards covering the automotive on-highway, off-highway and machinery domain. Download for free from the download section.

OPENCOSS (Open Platform for EvolutioNary Certification of Safety-critical Systems) is a recently approved R&D project. The project 17 partners aim at a common certification framework that spans different vertical markets for the railway, avionics and automotive industry, and establish a common safety certification infrastructure. The strategy is to focus on a compositional and evolutionary certification approach with the capability to reuse safety arguments, safety evidence, and contextual information about system components, in a way that makes certification more cost-effective, precise, and scalable. OPENCOSS will define a common certification language by unifying the requirements and terminology of different industries and building a common approach to certification activities.

OPENCOSS aims at developing a tool infrastructure for managing certification information and performing safety assurance activities. Within this infrastructure, systematic and auditable processes will be developed to reduce uncertainty and (re)certification costs. To have long-lasting industrial impact, the project will pursue standardisation of the conceptual framework and the tool infrastructure resulting from the project. 

More information will be made available at a later stage.

Altreonic offers two main product lines in conjunction with services. A short overview:

1. "VirtuosoNext^TM" is composed of following integrated development tools:

"VirtuosoNext^TM" is a next generation RTOS that is API compatible with OpenComRTOS, who's kernel is integrated. It provides fine-grain Time and Space Partitioning. The result is the protection that is offered by classical Time and Space Partitioning schemes but with the responsiveness and small code size of a dedicated RTOS. The user has the option to enable or disable protection on specific nodes (if the hardware supports it). 

"VirtuosoNext^TM" is a network-centric RTOS, developed using formal methods. It supports from small microcontrollers to widely distributed networks of processing nodes, including nodes that run legacy OS like Windows or Linux. VirtuosoNext^TM is the first network-centric RTOS that support heterogeneous systems in a transparent way.

Thanks to its formal development, it has unique properties like small code size, scalability, safety, portability even allowing developers to create their own services. It comes with the Visual Designer development environment allowing a graphical definition of the application and powerful tracing tools to profile the events in the system. While customers can do their own ports, ARM (Mx/Rx/Ax), Texas Instruments C6678, MicroBlaze, Leon3, PowerPC, XMOS, NXP CoolFlux DSP and MLX16 are available for specific boards. A typical code size is between 5 to 22 KiBytes. Altreonic offers porting and customisation services.

The "RTOS Qualification Package" is an optional component to the Open Technology License. Delivered as a GoedelWorks project, it gives detailed documentation and evidence for Qualification/Certification purposes with full test coverage and detailed traceability from top level Requirements till source code.

"Visual Designer" is a Visual programming and development environment for developing and simulating real-time embedded applications. It allows to define in a visual way the target's topology (from single processor to heterogeneous networks) as well as the application diagram. Template code is generated so that the developer only has to provide the algorithmic code. Applications can be simulated first on a Windows or Linux platform and then run on the target just by recompilation. It also has some powerful debugging tools:

• "Event Tracer". It allows to analyse the scheduling and interprocessor communication in a graphical way.
• "System Inspector": it allows to read out the status of any processing node at task level.

^{VirtuosoNextTM} also offers dynamic code loading and execution, independently of the target processor. This capability is offered thanks to our SVM, short for "Safe Virtual Machine for C": very small (around 3 KiBytes), it allows to load and execute binary compiled C code tasks that has full access to the underlying RTOS services.