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A Novel Runtime Monitoring Architecture
Ref: CISTER-TR-150310       Publication Date: 25 to 28, Mar, 2015

Abstract:
Verification and testing is one of the most costly and time consuming steps during the development of safety critical systems. The advent of complex and sometimes partially unpredictable computing architectures such as multicore commercial-of-the-shelf platforms, together with the composable development approach adopted in multiple industrial domains such as avionics and automotive, rendered the accurate modelling of the whole system overly complicated. Therefore, the exhaustive testing of all situations that could potentially be encountered by the system once deployed on the field became nearly impossible. Runtime verification (RV) is a promising solution to help accelerate the development of safety critical applications whilst maintaining the high degree of reliability required by such systems. RV adds monitors in the application, that check at runtime if the system is behaving according to predefined specifications. In case of abnormal deviations from the specifications, safe-guarding measures can be triggered in order to keep the system and its environment in a safe state, as well as potentially attempting to recover from the fault.
Most of the work carried out on RV essentially focused on the monitor generation, thereby concentrating on the expressiveness of the specification language and its translation in correct-by-construction monitors. Few of them addressed the problematic of designing an efficient and safe runtime monitoring (RM) architecture. Yet, RM is a key component for runtime verification. The RM layer gathers information from the monitored application and transmits it to the monitors. Therefore, without an efficient and reliable RM architecture, the whole RV system becomes useless, as its inputs and hence by extension its outputs cannot be trusted.
In this work, we specifically focus on the runtime monitoring architecture and propose a novel, efficient and reliable solution to integrate monitors with application code. The design of the presented runtime monitoring framework is perfectly suited to safety critical systems such as avionics, space, railway or automotive applications, as well as any other embedded system.

Geoffrey Nelissen

,

David Pereira

,

Luis Miguel Pinho

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