Parametric schedulability analysis of a launcher flight control system under reactivity constraints
This work addresses the challenge of reducing development costs and durations for complex space missions by automating system design, though it is incremental as it builds on existing formal methods and tools.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically synthesizing scheduling parameters for a space launcher flight control system under reactivity constraints, using parametric formal models and a timed model checker to compute results, which are compared to those from classical scheduling tools.
The next generation of space systems will have to achieve more and more complex missions. In order to master the development cost and duration of such systems, an alternative to a manual design is to automatically synthesize the main parameters of the system. In this paper, we present an approach for the specific case of the scheduling of the flight control of a space launcher. The approach requires two successive steps: (1) the formalization of the problem to be solved in a parametric formal model and (2) the synthesis of the model parameters with a tool. We first describe the problem of the scheduling of a launcher flight control, then we show how this problem can be formalized with parametric stopwatch automata; we then present the results computed by the parametric timed model checker IMITATOR. We enhance our model by taking into consideration the time for switching context, and we compare the results to those obtained by other tools classically used in scheduling.