Technology transfer and certification issues in safety critical real time systems

The advances in recent years in the academic field of scheduling of real-time systems have not been matched to the same degree within industry, especially within safety critical systems development. This is to some extent prudent, as the maturity of methods and techniques must be assured before being utilised within systems upon which lives depend once the applicability of a technique has been assured in theory, however, there are still major hurdles to be overcome in convincing customers, project managers, engineers and certifying authorities of the safety and/or applicability of the method. This paper briefly discusses the approach taken and the lessons learned when introducing fixed-priority based scheduling into a safety-critical system. It concentrates on the migration of the scheduling method from a largely academic idea into an “industry strength” technique, and the steps that had to be taken to achieve this migration. These include the close co-operation between university staff and company engineers; the championing of the technique within the target engineering department; and the liaison between development engineers, customer quality and safety representatives and the certification authorities. The introduction of the new technology highlighted some key lessons to be learned when managing such projects in the future. These need to be understood by both engineers and academics alike if they wish to see the successful uptake of novel ideas within an industrial application