Parallel execution of AUTOSAR legacy applications on multicore ECUs with timed implicit communication

Parallelization of AUTOSAR legacy applications is a fundamental step to exploit the performance of multi-core ECUs (MCEs). However, the migration of an application from a single-core ECU (SCE) to a MCE presents two challenges: first, the extraction of parallelism from an application (composed of tasks) is not always possible due to communication among tasks. Second, reproducing the same data-flow on all target MCEs is required to guarantee the same (predictable) functional behaviour without exhaustive validation and testing efforts. This paper introduces timed implicit communication (TIC) for decoupling task communication to allow parallel execution of producer and consumer, while the same data-flow is achieved on all MCEs. Therefore, AUTOSAR implicit communication is applied at task-level and extended by defined communication times, which are derived from the original SCE configuration. This is realized by storing produced data in a buffer with a publication timestamp attached. TIC is implemented at AUTOSAR RTE level and does not require modification of source code.