Paving the way for multi-cores in industrial hard real-time control applications

The rise of multicore processors for industrial embedded control applications forces companies to face the challenge of replacing legacy single-core applications by multithreaded programs. We present a systematic and tool-supported approach starting with existing single-core code and transforming it into multi-threaded code such that timing analysis is preserved and eased. The approach is based on (a) scheduling periodic tasks onto multiple dedicated cores as well as (b) executing other code parts after a model-based parallelization, which introduces structured parallelism only, on the remaining cores. The main advantage of our approach compared to a re-implementation is a strongly reduced effort for implementation and testing because of the reuse of existing code. The approach is demonstrated and evaluated for the control code of a foundation crane; slack time is introduced as measurement for the effectiveness.