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New Application Note on OpenComRTOS Designer

This is the third publication in the Gödel Series. The publication was written as an application note and shows how OpenComRTOS Designer can be used as a simulation as well as a development environment while keeping the source code. This is achieved by way of the transparent programming model that allows considering a network of processors as a virtual single processor one. The application note applies it to the development of a skid steering controller.

The application note demonstrates how Altreonic's OpenComRTOS Designer allows for embedded software developers of heterogeneous distributed systems to cross develop and simulate their application on a PC environment and seamlessly transfer their code to the target hardware. To this end a Microsemi Evaluation Kit is utilised as the target hardware for a hub motor skid steering based speed controller of an Electric Personal Mobility Device.

Meet Altreonic at National Electronics Week ADEC Expo

Visit and meet us at this biennial show, the only event in South Africa that is dedicated to the electronics production, components, systems and applications sector. Booth 4/51.

Attend our presentation "Systems Engineering for the masses with GoedelWorks and OpenComRTOS"

ANTIFRAGILE 2014, 2-5 June 2014. Paper available.

The novel topic of antifragility could initiate a paradigm shift on how we think about systems engineering, especially in a societal context. For those following the ARRL LinkedIn group, our paper on the antifragility concept in systems and safety engineering was accepted. It was a good exercise. Relevant conclusions:

  1. We need an ARRL-6 and an ARRL-7 level. ARRL-7 is the actual antifragile level. ARRL-6 is halfway (monitoring and preventive maintenance with immediate repair).
  2. For ARRL-7, we need to consider the environment with its processes and stakeholders as well as a supervising independent regulating authority as part of the system. Some might call this a "system of systems".
  3. Antifragile systems actually exist. Examples are the aviation industry, telecommunication networks, and other. Most of them have a societal importance.
  4. We can consider adaptive biological systems as ARRL-8 systems.

It was nice to see that the ARRL criterion scales so easily and is in line with what actually exists in the real world. We are currently in the process of investigating what this means for mobility and transport. This system is currently more or less at ARRL-3. Bringing it to ARRL-7 will require a serious effort and paradigm shift, but this could well be the only way to keep it sustainable.

Links to the workshop here.

 

ANTIFRAGILE 2014, 2-5 June 2014. Call for papers and participation.

Call for papers and participation. Deadline extended till 21st February 2014.

This is the first International Workshop on the new topic of Antifragile systems.

“From Dependable to Resilient, from Resilient to Antifragile Ambients and systems”

Keynote speaker: Dr. Kennie H. Jones from NASA kindly agreed to give a keynote speech at ANTIFRAGILE 2014. He will discuss, among other issues, the role that antifragile engineering is playing within NASA and how this research direction may provide an answer to the design challenges of large and complex resilient and antifragile systems.

Meet Altreonic at ERTS 2014, 5 - 7 February in Toulouse

The ERTS2 Congress is a unique European cross sector event on Embedded Software and Systems, a platform for top-level scientific with representatives from universities, research centers and industries. The previous editions gathered more than 100 talks, 500 participants and 60 exhibitors and is located in the heart of a region where Airbus is a leading player in developing safe air transport systems.

Altreonic will demonstrate the latest version of GoedelWorks and OpenComRTOS Designer.

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Wishes for 2014

Wishes on the next page.

Product updates for OpenComRTOS Designer and GoedelWorks

1. OpenComRTOS Designer (v.1.6) was enhanced with support for C++ and new services were added.

2. GoedelWorks (v.1.1) features a new navigation tree and now generates dependency trees in graphml for easier processing. A utility was created that facilitates importing existing software projects.

ARRL white paper v.1.0 released. Join discussion group on LinkedIn.

Thanks to the initial feedback and the continuing discussion, the first official version of the ARRL (Assured Reliability and Resilience Level) white paper is not made public. See the attachment below. To foster further the discussion, a LinkedIn discussion group was set up. LinkedIn discussions have played an important role in helping to formulate the initial ARRL concept and we believe that the discussion could deepen and spread the concept further. Thinking and understanding ARRL is not only a matter for safety engineers but will benefit anyone involved with engineering systems. Visit the group here.

Feedback and discussions welcome.

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Meet and share your views on ARRL with Altreonic

The ARRL (Assured Reliability and Resilience Level) criterion we presented a few weeks ago at the SASSUR/SAFECOMP workshop for the first time was generally well received and appreciated as a new way to look at safety and systems engineering. Of course, a new concept never emerges alone and also in the standards one can find approaches going in the same direction (SEooC, tool qualification, IMA, etc.). We also received very helpful critical remarks and we appreciate this as turning the ARRL criterion into a really usable and normative tool for engineering still requires serious thinking and refinement. 

This process is on-going and you can meet and discuss with Altreonic at following upcoming events:

1. ADCSS workshop at ESTEC (Noordwijk)

The 7th ESA Workshop on Avionics Data, Control and Software Systems will take place from 22 till 24th October. This workshop discusses scientific as well as technical choices to be made to achieve a greater reuse of on-board electronics and software. Details can be found at the ESA website.

2. ICSSEA 2013 Conference (Paris)

Sponsored by AFIS (the French Association for Systems Engineering) and INCOSE, co-organized by TELECOM ParisTech, CS Communication & Systems, and the Génie Logiciel, the 25th edition of the ICSSEA Conference (International Conference on Software & Systems Engineering and their Applications) will be held in Paris on November 4-6, 2013. It aims at providing a critical survey of the status of tools, methods, and processes for elaborating software & systems. Details can be found at the ICSEEA website.

Dr. Bernhard Sputh of Altreonic will present "From safety integrity level to assured reliability and resilience level for composable safety critical systems".

3. IEEE ISSRE 2013 Symposium (Passedena)

The 24th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering will take place November 4-7 in Passadena, CA, USA. More details on the ISSRE website.

Eric Verhulst will present the ARRL criterion in the Industry Papers track.

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Integrated FPGA support with OpenComRTOS Designer

Altreonic announces integrated FPGA support for its multicore/manycore capable OpenComRTOS Designer on Microsemi’s SmartFusion-II.

Advanced chip technology has in the last decade reached a level of integration whereby complete systems can now be made available in a single package. Such Systems On a Chip (SoC) contains often multiple types of processor cores, each specialized for their function, but also smart I/O blocks, on chip networks, caches and program as well as data memory. Recent chips also add FPGA logic blocks.

Since 2005 Altreonic has developed a formally developed runtime system and development environment called OpenComRTOS Designer. Formally developed, it has a typical code size of 5 to 10 KB and supports systems in a fully scalable way. It transparently supports systems with heterogeneous processing nodes as well as heterogeneous communication mechanisms. This makes it suitable for networked, distributed systems as well as for on-chip many/multicore SoC. Board Support packages have been developed for example  for TI’s C6678 8-core multi-DSP, Intel’s 48-core SCC as well as for multicore ARM and PPC systems, often replacing traditional memory hungry POSIX-style RTOS.

Today, Altreonic announces integrated FPGA support, demonstrated on Microsemi’s SmartFusion-II. On this chip the user finds a 166 MHz ARM Cortex M3, DMA, I/O blocks and memory as well as a flash programmable FPGA logic. Traditional approaches will treat the FPGA as a co-processing block that is explicitly accessed using dedicated software running on the ARM. In OpenComRTOS tasks synchronise and communicate using so-called intermediate “hub entities” that fully decouple tasks allowing them to be anywhere in the network whereby OpenComRTOS takes cares of the inter-node communication.

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