MultiPARTES: Multi-core partitioning and virtualization for easing the certification of mixed-criticality systems

The consumer market is continuously pushing for smarter, faster, more durable and cheaper products with ever more complex and sophisticated functionality. Other fields such as safety–critical and dependable applications are not unaware of these requirements, and even impose others (e.g. certification). In the current multi-core era, industry and research entities are facing the important challenge of fulfilling all these requirements, which often impose the necessity for integrating components with different levels of dependability in a single hardware platform. In this scenario, new concerns appear with respect to safety certification of the resulting mixed-criticality systems (e.g. temporal and spatial isolation). This article describes the research effort that is being conducted within the FP7 MultiPARTES project, which is one of the initiatives launched by the European Commission to explore new solutions for developing certifiable mixed-criticality systems using heterogeneous multi-cores. The article explains the proposed development toolset for such systems, presents a proof-of-concept implementation and shows its applicability in a real-world application that needs to be certified, namely a wind-power turbine.