A METHOD OF PREDICTING THE MAINTENANCE PERIOD OF EMBEDDED SYSTEMS FOR PREVENTING BREACH OF THEIR TIME REQUIREMENTS

Dmytro Fedasyuk,Tetyana Marusenkova,Ratybor Chopey

doi:10.47839/ijc.17.2.995

Abstract

The work deals with a significant problem of ensuring that the execution time of a firmware running inside a microcontroller-based real-time embedded system never goes out of its expected range, no matter for how long the embedded system has been used. Once having been tested before the first usage, a newly created embedded system is gradually getting slower in its response, due to the fact that its hardware components get worn-out with aging. A possible solution is a replacement of the hardware components that most contribute to such a change in the response time of the embedded system. If such a replacement takes place too far in advance, long before hardware components actually start showing any decline in their response time, the above-mentioned solution is cost-ineffective and impractical, as it leads to a waste of equipment and efforts. We introduce a method for predicting the appropriate maintenance period of a real-time embedded system on the basis of the characteristics of its hardware components.

Highlights

The firmware execution time is one of the most important metrics of software running in real-time embedded systems, as the applicability of the latter depends on the logical correctness of such a software, and on the timeliness of its results [1]
In order to ensure the required level of reliability and safety of real-time embedded systems, additional kinds of software analysis should be applied to them. One of such kinds is an analysis of the firmware execution time controlled by standards DO178B [2] and ARINC 653 [3]. These standards do not regulate any conditions for testing and do not prescribe any methods that would make allowances for the fact that hardware components of an embedded system are gradually getting worn-out over time and, for this reason, the response time of any embedded system tends to worsen over time
One of the ways to keep the firmware execution time within its expected range is to perform the maintenance of an embedded system on time, i.e., to replace all the hardware items composing the system, that tend to show some noticeable decline in their response time with age

Summary

Introduction

The firmware execution time is one of the most important metrics of software running in real-time embedded systems, as the applicability of the latter depends on the logical correctness of such a software, and on the timeliness of its results [1]. In order to ensure the required level of reliability and safety of real-time embedded systems, additional kinds of software analysis should be applied to them. One of such kinds is an analysis of the firmware execution time controlled by standards DO178B [2] and ARINC 653 [3]. These standards do not regulate any conditions for testing and do not prescribe any methods that would make allowances for the fact that hardware components of an embedded system are gradually getting worn-out over time and, for this reason, the response time of any embedded system tends to worsen over time (the longer an embedded system has been in use, the slower its response time proves to be).

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion