Functional Test Environment for Time-Triggered Control Systems in Complex MPSoCs using GALI

Many safety-critical and especially mixed-criticality computer systems are realized as a time-triggered (TT) system. Such systems execute one or more tasks according to a predetermined scheduling. The main advantage of TT systems is their deterministic timing behavior. With the ability of today's programmable MPSoC architectures, complex TT systems based on hypervisors (to support spatial isolation) and timing predictable Networks-on-Chip can be built on a single chip. For the integration of functionality on such a TT MPSoC not only the timing, but also the interplay of functional behavior and timing, needs to be validated. In the past, functional integration testing has been performed on a prototyping board, sometimes in a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) configuration to support testing against a complex environment model. In this work, we propose a Globally Accurate Locally Inaccurate (GALI) simulation model that combines an instruction accurate simulation engine with a global time-triggered scheduler. GALI is demonstrated and evaluated on a full functional flight-control system of a mixed-criticality case-study. For this case-study, we will show that our GALI simulation achieves the same control behavior as a fast cycle accurate simulation, but runs 160 times faster. In comparison with the fastest state-of-the-art approximately timed simulation models, GALI runs between 2.3 and 47 times faster for the considered case-study.