Section: Scientific Foundations

Fondation 1

In order to check for the timing behavior and the reliability of distributed systems, the TRIO team developed several techniques based on deterministic approaches ; in particular, we apply and extend analytical evaluation of worst case response times and when necessary, e.g. for large-scale communication systems as Internet based applications, we use techniques based on network calculus.

When the environment might lead to hazards (e.g. electromagnetic interferences causing transmission errors and bit-flips in memory), or when some characteristics of the system are not perfectly known or foreseeable beforehand, we model and analyze the uncertainties using stochastic models, for instance, models of the frame transmission patterns or models of the transmission errors. In the context of real time computing, we are in general much more interested by worst-case results over a given time window than by average and asymptotic results, and dedicated analyses in that area have been developed in our team over the last 10 years. An illustration is our contribution to the extension of “consecutive-k-out-of-n:F” analyses, applied to the reliability evaluation of X-by-Wire systems. As far as the design of discrete event systems is concerned, we mainly use scheduling techniques for real time systems.

In the design of discrete event systems with hard real time constraints, the scheduling of the system's activities is of crucial importance. This means that we have to devise scheduling policies that ensure the respect of time constraints on line and / or optimize the behavior of the system according to some other application-dependent performance criteria.

Many current systems can adapt dynamically to the environment. This is why we focus on “weakly hard” real time constraints such as $(m,k)$-firm constraints and study their applicability in two main application fields. The first one is concerned by application under weakly hard constraints, as real time multimedia application that are deployed for example on internet; in this case, the main problem is to adapt the $(m,k)$-pattern to the current requirements in terms of real time Quality of Service. The second domain where these techniques are investigated is the co-design of networked control systems. It has to be noted that in this domain several approaches are developed by the community; some of them focus on the automatic control problem and try to solve it by delayed systems while other ones are concerned only by the scheduling techniques to implement in order to guarantee the timing properties required by the closed loops. In this context, we propose to specify how to scale both control law parameters and scheduling strategies for tasks and messages and, for this purpose, we integrate control theory (linear systems, multi-variables), optimisation and schedulability analysis in order to develop off-line and on-line techniques