Abstract-To move mixed criticality research into industrial practice requires models whose run-time behaviour is acceptable to systems engineers. Certain aspects of current models, such as abandoning lower criticality tasks when certain situations arise, do not give the robustness required in application domains such as the automotive and aerospace industries. In this paper a new bailout protocol is developed that still guarantees high criticality software but minimises the negative impact on lower criticality software via a timely return to normal operation. We show how the bailout protocol can be integrated with existing techniques, utilising both offline slack and online gain-time to further improve performance. Static analysis is provided for schedulability guarantees, while scenario-based evaluation via simulation is used to explore the effectiveness of the protocol.Index Terms-Real-Time Systems, Mixed Criticality, Fixed Priority Scheduling, Mode Changes.
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Preliminary publicationThis paper extends initial research into a bailout protocol for mixed criticality systems presented at ECRTS 2015 [1]. The additional material includes: An extended worked example illustrating, in figures 1 and 2, the behaviour of the bailout protocol as compared to the baseline Adaptive Mixed Criticality (AMC) scheduling policy. Extensions to reclaim gain-time, which becomes available when a task executes for less than its worst-case execution time budget. Integration of this technique with the bailout protocol is described in Section 5. An extended scenario based evaluation, in Section 6. This examines the benefits of gain-time reclamation in conjunction with the baseline Adaptive Mixed Criticality (AMC) scheduling policy and with the bailout protocol. The evaluation also covers additional metrics including the number of times that the system has to go into a HI-criticality mode, and the amount of time spent in that mode. It is also extended to show how a variety of different factors impact the performance of the bailout protocol and other scheduling policies, thus showing the broad range of circumstances in which the protocol is effective. Finally, in Section 8 we show how the bailout protocol can be adapted to systems with multiple criticality levels.