Safety Certification of Mixed-Criticality Systems

This chapter explains the overall DREAMS safety certification strategy. It describes basic certification concepts and their applicability to mixed-criticality multi-core systems. It analyses the safety certification strategy with the description of modular safety cases, mixed-criticality solution patterns, DREAMS Functional Safety Management, product lines and a methodology for the certification of mixed-criticality product lines. The chapter explores the proposed method for the certification of mixed-criticality product lines. ‘Evaluation’ is the same activity which is referred to in IEC 61508 as ‘assessment’ or ‘functional safety assessment’ since it is a standard for Functional Safety. The IEC 61508 safety standard covers the failures caused by memory sharing such as the causal factors of the execution interference between components of a single computer platform. The harmonization of the underlying requirements from different safety standards is an ongoing trend, although currently, no cross-domain solution copes with the differences between the safety standards.