Model-Based Adaptation of Mixed-Criticality Multiservice Systems for Extreme Physical Environments

An increasingly important trend in the design of industry-strength embedded systems is the integration of multiple services with varying criticality levels into a common computing platform. Such systems are characterized as mixed-criticality multiservice systems (MCMSs). An MCMS has to survive in rigorous environments posed by industry-level requirements. Such survival, however, is becoming continuously more challenging due to the growing system complexity and integrating more and more services. While existing works typically target reliability-driven design optimization to improve the system robustness rather than deal with the surviving problem of the system in extreme physical environments, this paper addresses the problem by enabling the service capability transitions of an MCMS to adapt to the environments. This paper proposes a service capability model to capture the importance of functional modules for the criticality of different services. A model-based service-capability transition mechanism is designed to automatically identify the maximum allowed service capability under a given physical environment. A case study of the proposed techniques was performed on an industrial Ethernet switch which is a typical MCMS, to validate the capability of adaptation to high and low temperatures. The experimental results demonstrate the significant potential of our approach to improve system survivability under extreme physical environments.