Safety-critical systems are often subjected to transient faults. Since these transient faults may lead to soft errors that cause catastrophic consequences, error-handling must be addressed by design. Full-protection against faults is too costly in terms of resource usage. A common approach to relax the resource demands and limit the impact of errors is to consider (m, k)-constraints, which requires that at least $m$ jobs out of any k consecutive jobs are error-free. To assure (m, k)-compliance, static patterns are widely used to select the job execution modes, i.e., either in an error-free mode at the cost of increased worst-case execution time or in an error-prone mode with the advantage of less execution time.

Although static patterns have been shown to be effective in energy-aware designs, resource over-provision is inevitable due to the relatively low rate of error probability. In this work, we propose two dynamic (and adaptive) approaches that allow the scheduler to dynamically select execution modes based on the error-history of the past jobs and the actual error probability. We firstly propose a Markov Chain based solution if the error-probability is known and static and secondly a reinforcement learning-based approach that can handle unknown error probabilities. Experimental evaluations show that our approaches outperform the state-of-the-art in most of the evaluated cases in terms of average utilization for each task and the overall utilization for multitask systems.

In soft real-time systems, tasks may occasionally miss their deadlines. This possibility has triggered research on probabilistic timing analysis for the execution time of a single program and probabilistic response time analysis of concurrently executed tasks. Under fixed-priority preemptive uniprocessor scheduling, it was shown that the classical critical instant theorem (for deriving the worst-case schedulability or response time) by Liu and Layland (in JACM 1973) can be applied to analyze the worst-case deadline failure probability (WCDFP) and the worst-case response time exceedance probability (WCRTEP). In this work, we present a counterexample for this result, showing that the WCDFP and WCRTEP derived by the classical critical instant theorem is unsound. We further provide two sound methods: one is to account for one additional carry-in job of a higher-priority task and another is to sample and inflate the execution time of certain jobs without adding one additional carry-in job. We show that these two methods do not dominate each other and, in the evaluation, apply them to two well-known approaches based on direct convolution and Chernoff bounds.

Modern low power distributed systems tend to integrate machine learning algorithms. In resource-constrained setups, the execution of the models has to be optimized for performance and energy consumption. Racetrack memory (RTM) promises to achieve these goals by offering unprecedented integration density, smaller access latency, and reduced energy consumption. However, to access data in RTM, it needs to be shifted to the access port first. We investigate decision trees and develop placement strategies to reduce the total number of shifts in RTM.

Random forests and decision trees are increasingly interesting candidates for resource-constrained machine learning models. In order to make the execution of these models efficient under resource limitations, various optimized implementations have been proposed in the literature, usually implementing either native trees or if-else trees. While a certain motivation for the optimization of if-else trees is to benefit the behavior of dedicated instruction caches, in this work we highlight that if-else trees might also strongly depend on data caches.

In the near future, the development of autonomous driving will get more complex as the vehicles will not only rely on their own sensors but also communicate with other vehicles and the infrastructure to cooperate and improve the driving experience. Towards this, several research areas, such as robotics, communication, and control, are required to collaborate in order to implement future-ready methods. However, each area focuses on the development of its own components first, while the effects the components may have on the whole system are only considered at a later stage. In this work, we integrate the simulation tools of robotics, communication and control namely ROS2, OMNeT++, and MATLAB to evaluate cooperative driving scenarios.

For cyber-physical systems, real-time virtualization optimizes the hardware utilization by consolidating multiple systems into the same platform, while satisfying the timing constraints of their real-time tasks. This paper considers virtualization based on unikernels, i.e., single address space kernels usually constructed by using library operating systems. Each unikernel is a guest operating system in the virtualization and hosts a single real-time task.