Description:

One of the reasons avionic, railway, automotive and space vehicles fly and drive so safely is a stringent design method
rooted in absolute predictability, paired with an exact schedule, denoting when the individual components of such systems
are allowed to act. These so-called time-triggered systems have gained much attention, both in research and in industrial
application and are now among the technologies foreseen to be used for the lunar gateway. However, their strength is also
what makes them inflexible in more modern and demanding applications, such as autonomous driving, in service robots or
in future asteroid mining missions.
In this project, we will investigate the boundaries of temporal flexibility for time-triggered systems in the scope of modern
architectures. Rather than adding flexibility by relaxing individual restrictions at the cost of overall system properties, we will
systematically investigate the relations between time-triggered and more relaxed activation schemes and the degree up to
which the properties of time-triggered systems can be retained. We will push the basis for time-triggered operation beyond
the fixed time slots used to schedule a-priori knon applications and system configurations, while providing quantitative
tradeoffs w.r.t to properties such as reliability. While existing time-triggered architectures, provide a single, fixed bundled
solutions focusing on simplicity and efficiency for the most safety-critical systems, where late computation or
communication can have disastrous effects, we will provide for various bundles to be configured, meeting various demands
and criticalities of applications and systems. Not meaning to replace existing time-triggered solutions, we aim to provide a
wider range of solutions and tradeoffs to be selected and simultaneously deployed in today's and future systems, in
particular in those cyber-physical and safety-critical systems we depend on.