Growing complexity of applications makes the integration of security and dependability an issue in many domains (e.g. energy supply, transportation, industrial control, and aerospace). The engineering of embedded systems need to take these aspects into account. However, guaranteeing security and dependability in a situation of increasing system complexity is leading to unacceptable development cost and time to market, specially for SMEs, due to the price of tools. Support of mixed criticality for embedded systems based on multi-core open source virtualization is the main challenge of this project. A way to avoid the increased validation and certification effort is to incorporate mechanisms that establish multiple partitions on the same hardware platform with strict temporal and spatial separation between the individual partitions. In this approach, applications with different levels of criticality can be placed in different partitions and can be verified and validated in isolation, the MultiPArtes approach.

This approach allows for managing complexity while keeping down development effort, but this concept needs to be adapted and applied to heterogeneous multi-core systems. This project aims at developing tools and solutions based on mixed criticality and assurance-based virtualization systems for multi-core. The starting point for virtualisation support is Xtratum, an open source cost-effective hypervisor developed specifically for real-time embedded systems by one of the project participants (UPV) that is being increasingly used by the aerospace industry. Based on this approach, MultiPARTES will offer a rapid and cost-effective development of trust real-time embedded systems sharing critical and no critical applications the system resources.