Towards a Modelling and Design Framework for Mixed-Criticality SoCs and Systems-of-Systems

Mixed-criticality system (MCS) design is an emerging discipline, which has been identified as a core foundational concept in fields such as cyber-physical systems. The hard real-time design community has pioneered the contributions to MCS design, extending scheduling theory to consider mixed-criticalities and the impact of on-chip and off-chip communication infrastructures. However, the development of MCS design methodologies capable to provide safe and efficient solutions for complex applications and platforms in an acceptable design time demands a more interdisciplinary approach. This paper is a first step towards such an approach in the development of MCS design methodologies. The paper first identifies main design disciplines to be involved in MCS design, both at SoC and system-of-systems (SoS) scales. Then, the paper proposes a core ontology for modelling a mixed-criticality system at both SoC scale (MCSoC) and SoS scale (MCSoS). Finally, the paper introduces a set of aspects required for MCS design which have been identified as open and challenging attending the overviewed state-of-the-art.