Static computation of the worst-case reaction time (WCRT) is required for the real-time execution of synchronous programs. Existing approaches use model checking or integer linear programming. we formulate this as an abstraction-based reachability analysis yielding a lower worst case complexity. Benchmarking shows a significant overall speed-up of 64-times over existing approaches.

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Abstract-Synchronous languages are widely used to design safety-critical embedded systems. These languages are based on the synchrony hypothesis, asserting that all tasks must complete instantaneously at each logical time step. This assertion is, however, unsuitable for the design of mixed-criticality systems, where some tasks can tolerate missed deadlines. This paper proposes a novel extension to the synchronous approach for supporting three levels of task criticality: life, mission, and non-critical. We achieve this by relaxing the synchrony hypothesis to allow tasks that can tolerate bounded or unbounded deadline misses. We address the issue of task communication between multirate, mixed-criticality tasks, and propose a deterministic lossless communication model. To maximize system utilization, we present a hybrid static and dynamic scheduling approach that executes schedulable tasks during slack time. Extensive benchmarking shows that our approach can schedule up to 15% more task sets and achieve an average of 5.38% better system utilization than the Early-Release EDF (ER-EDF) approach. Tasks are scheduled fairer under our approach and achieve consistently higher execution frequencies, but require more preemptions.

The IEC 61499 is an international standard for describing industrial process-control systems. Such systems typically consist of embedded computers that interact closely with physical processes within a feedback loop. In order to correctly control these physical processes, computations in response to inputs need to be done in a timely manner. A program's worstcase reaction time (WCRT) to inputs is usually used to ensure that timing constraints are met. Unfortunately, the standard has no provisions for specifying real-time constraints. Moreover, typical implementations of IEC 61499 are tightly coupled to their runtime environments-each with possibly different semantics and temporal properties-which makes it difficult to automate the estimation of their WCRTs. We propose to adopt a synchronous model for IEC 61499 programs. This allows the programs to be executed without the need of a run-time environment. Consequently, we are able to use a novel model-checking technique to estimate the WCRT of IEC 61499 programs. Experimental results on a suite of programs show that this approach provides conservative estimates that are, on average, less than 10 percent off from the actual WCRT.

Increasing automation and external connectivity in industrial control systems (ICS) demand a greater emphasis on software-level communication security. In this article, we propose a secure-by-design development method for building ICS applications, where requirements from security standards like ISA/IEC 62443 are fulfilled by design-time abstractions called secure links. Proposed as an extension to the IEC 61499 development standard, secure links incorporate both light-weight and traditional security mechanisms into applications with negligible effort. Applications containing secure links can be automatically compiled into fully IEC 61499-compliant software. Experimental results show secure links significantly reduce design and code complexity and improve application maintainability and requirements traceability.