Altreonic selected in EuroCPS open call with VirtuosoNext

Altreonic has been selected in the EuroCPS [1] project to port a Flight Management test application with VirtuosoNext on an avionics platform of Thales [2]. EuroCPS is an European funded project focusing on advanced computing and cyber-physical systems. It gathers several design centers in order to boost and initiate synergies between innovative companies, major CPS-platforms and CPS-competency providers. The specific project with Altreonic is labeled NoFiST (Novel Fine Grain Space and Time Partitioning for a Mixed Criticality Platform) and is a cooperation with Thales TRT. Hereby the abstract:

The NoFist project aims at validating  and refining a novel approach to Space and Time Partitioning that is specifically adapted to the needs of mixed criticality embedded systems, in particular when executing on advanced and heterogeneous many/multi-core SoC target systems. Contrary to existing approaches, no dynamic code is used but a static memory image. No hypervisor layer and time-slicing is used but a formally developed and verified RTOS kernel. Together with a driver layer, it isolates the application layer from hardware faults as a trusted layer. Tasks can be individually isolated or as an application group from each other by using the hardware support (MMU or MPU). The benefit of the approach are lower memory requirements and the capability to still meet hard real-time constraints as achievable with a non partition RTOS. 

VirtuosoNext comes with a visual modelling environment allowing programming a heterogeneous target system in a transparent way. Time properties can be used as additional restrictions on the space partitioning support. VirtuosoNext also provides support for fault tolerance allowing to continue operation in the presence of faults, to recover or to gracefully restart. The transparent support for distributed and heterogeneous target systems, also facilitates implementing redundancy (e.g; TMR schemas) as well as diversity.

The approach will be validated by implementing an adapted VirtuosoNext on the multi/manycore platform selected by Thales TRT for mixed criticality applications in the avionics domain. The selected one is based on a quad core Freescale/NXP T2081 PowerPC runnig at up to 1.8 GHz. The requirements will be analysed, test suites developed, benchmarks developed and documented as a dependency tree project in GoedelWorks. The results will be disseminated in workshops and papers. The results are applicable across many other safety and security critical domains such as automotive, railway, medical and mission critical infrastructure systems. VirtuosoNext is also used in Altreonic's KURT vehicle controller. The latter uses an ARM M4F at 120 MHz.