Building Product-lines of Mixed-Criticality Systems

Abstract—Mixed-Criticality Systems (MCS) reconcile safetycritical
requirements with multi-core architectures, by offering
spatial and temporal isolation while preserving other extrafunctional
properties such as optimised energy consumption or
minimised latencies. MCS designers struggle to manually balance
the offered functionalities with pertinent implementation choices
in order to ensure that the system eventually meets all constraints.
Existing attempts to further automate this process focus on
specific concerns, and fail to account for variation in system
functionalities. Our contribution is to integrate product-lines that
capture functional variations with evolutionary optimisation to
explore possible implementations and their impact on extrafunctional
properties. Our solution is a model-driven process (and
a tool prototype) to automatically select functionally different
products that balance well the various concerns of interest. We
illustrate how this process applies to the construction of wind
turbines. Moving toward product-lines eventually contributes to
reduce high development costs and the long time to market
associated with MCS