[AllUsers-ISR] Palestra - Sobre os Desafios de Testar Sistemas de Tempo-Real em Malha-Fechada - dos Automóveis às Naves Espaciais

[Rui Araujo]

Boa tarde a todos,

Venho chamar a vossa atenção para a seguinte palestra que se irá realizar 
no próximo dia 7 de Novembro de 2016, pelas 14h15 no Anfiteatro A3 do 
DEEC-FCTUC:

Título: Sobre os Desafios de Testar Sistemas de Tempo-Real em 
Malha-Fechada - dos Automóveis às Naves Espaciais

Apresentação: João Esteves, Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Critical 
Software, SA

http://www.isr.uc.pt/~rui/csw/Seminario_20161107.pdf

Cumprimentos,
Rui Araújo

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Título: Sobre os Desafios de Testar Sistemas de Tempo-Real em 
Malha-Fechada - dos Automóveis às Naves Espaciais

Title: On the Challenges of Testing Hard Real-Time Systems in Closed-Loop 
Environments - From Cars to Spacecrafts

Local: Anfiteatro A3 - DEEC-UC - Departamento de Engenharia Electrotécnica 
e de Computadores, Universidade de Coimbra;
Data: 07 de Novembro de 2016;
Hora: 14h15.

ABSTRACT
It is common sense that things ar\e easier said than done. This common 
saying allow us making a parallel to safety critical hard real-time 
systems. These systems are easier to implement than to test. To a great 
extent, this happens because for the highly complex and integrated systems 
we are currently engineering, it takes more than a set of reliable and 
safe parts to make a reliable and safe system made out of those parts. 
This brings to our memory the video of the Tacoma bridge swinging in the 
wind and then falling to pieces down in the river. The problem was not in 
the individual parts that made the bridge but on the bridge itself. The 
difference between the parts of the bridge and the bridge itself is that 
the latter, is a closed-loop system that is made out of the specific 
arrangement of all its parts interacting with the surround environment.
Individual hard real-time components are like the individual parts that 
make a bridge or any other complex system. They may work well in isolation 
but the system, made of these individual components, may fail when 
deployed in its operation environment. This environment may be a 
spacecraft, an aircraft flying over the Atlantic, a complex production 
line in a modern factory, or an industrial product most of us use in a 
daily basis, a car.
The question we may ask then is, “how can we better assure ourselves that 
a given complex system will work safely and reliably as intended?”. The 
answer to this question has started to be formulated many years ago, 
though, to this date, the challenges are not all surpassed. An essential 
part of that answer is “we will use simulation and model based-development 
to make sure things are right and will integrate right before starting 
manufacturing them”. We believe this answer points us the right direction, 
but now we must see the challenges we face to actually implementing it. 
This is the subject of this seminar we will be delivering on November 7th 
at DEEC/FCT.
We will be looking at the high-level aspects of HW and SW architectures of 
closed-loop environments for the testing of hard real-time systems. Which 
are the challenges we must solve and technologies that we may use. We will 
do so while looking at a specific case study that illustrates the problem 
we want to solve – a closed loop environment for the testing of a 
Sun-synchronous spacecraft.

Speaker’s Bio
Mr. João Esteves joined CRITICAL Software in late 2000 and is, since 2012, 
the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for safety critical systems. Through the 
last 16 years Mr. João Esteves has had several technical roles, all 
related to the safety analysis, validation, development and testing of 
critical embedded systems for various application domains. He holds in his 
portfolio the participation in several Space missions including: CryoSat, 
LISA Path-Finder, Sentinel-2 and EarthCARE (currently in the final 
development stages); aerospace projects and standardisation groups, and 
coordination of activities in railway and automotive applications. Through 
this broad range of this industrial experience he has acquired a deep 
knowledge of the best practices, and more importantly, the challenges, 
faced by different sectors of the industry. His interests include: 
analysis of failure propagation in complex systems, simulation, hard 
real-time architectures, multi-core mixed criticality systems, HW/SW 
co-design and closed-loop test environments.