An industrial view on the common academic understanding of mixed-criticality systems

With the rapid evolution of commercial hardware platforms, in most application domains, the industry has shown a growing interest in integrating and running independently-developed applications of different “criticalities” in the same multi-core platform, with the objective of improving the performance/cost ratio of the system. Such integrated systems are commonly referred to as mixed-criticality systems (MCS). Most of the MCS-related research published in the state-of-the-art cite the safety-related standards associated to each application domain (e.g. aeronautics, space, railway, automotive). However, those standards are not, in most cases, freely available, and do not always clearly and explicitly specify the requirements for mixed-criticality systems. This paper addresses the important challenge of presenting the relevant information available in some of the safety-related standards, such that the mixed-criticality concept is understood from an industrialist’s perspective. In addition, the paper evaluates state-of-the-art mixed-criticality real-time scheduling models and algorithms against the safety-related standards.