AdaptMC: A control-theoretic approach for achieving resilience in mixed-criticality systems

A system is said to be resilient if slight deviations from expected behavior during run-time does not lead to catastrophic degradation of performance: minor deviations should result in no more than minor performance degradation. In mixed-criticality systems, such degradation should additionally be criticality-cognizant. The applicability of control theory is explored for the design of resilient run-time scheduling algorithms for mixed-criticality systems. Recent results in control theory have shown how appropriately designed controllers can provide guaranteed service to hard-real-time servers; this prior work is extended to allow for such guarantees to be made concurrently to multiple criticality-cognizant servers. The applicability of this approach is explored via several experimental simulations in a dual-criticality setting. These experiments demonstrate that our control-based run-time schedulers can be synthesized in such a manner that bounded deviations from expected behavior result in the high-criticality server suffering no performance degradation and the lower-criticality one, bounded performance degradation.