Re-Thinking Mixed-Criticality Architecture for Automotive Industry

Mixed-Criticality System (MCS) has been considered widely within academic literature, but is proving difficulty to implement in industry as the theoretical models underpinning the research do not always consider industrial safety standards and practice (e.g., DO-178C, ISO26262, and EN50128). This paper analyses and formalises the mismatches between theoretical models and industrial standards, and presents a generic industrial MCS architecture, termed as Z-MCS. Z-MCS is built upon the conventional theoretical MCS model (i.e., Adaptive Mixed-Criticality), but with additional satisfaction on the industrial safety requirements: i). run-time safety analysis, which determines preserved applications in each system mode; ii). correct partitioning and isolation of different critical elements with temporal, spatial and fault isolation. Furthermore, three implementing methods of Z-MCS are proposed, with a generic schedulability analysis for timing guarantee. Finally, we evaluate and demonstrate Z-MCS in terms of system schedulability and overheads, along with a real-world case study. In addition, this paper is the first attempt for connecting the theoretical MCS model with the industrial context.