Timeliness Assurance via Hybrid Approaches during Design of Distributed Embedded Computing Systems

Techniques for systematic derivation of tight service time bounds of subsystems of distributed real-time embedded computing systems, are a key for enabling practical and highly meaningful certification of timeliness of systems, which is the most challenging part of the reliability certification process. An approach which uses a hybrid of measurement-based statistical derivation approaches and worst-case analysis approaches in deriving tight service time bounds, is proposed. The use of this hybrid approach together with a divide-and-conquer strategy in deriving the service time bounds of complex systems, is also proposed. Major research issues that need to be resolved before the hybrid approach can be practiced are mentioned.