The Time-Triggered Architecture

The Time-Triggered Architecture (TTA) provides a computing infrastructure for the design and implementation of dependable distributed embedded systems. A large real-time application is decomposed into nearly autonomous clusters and nodes, and a fault-tolerant global time base of known precision is generated at every node. In the TTA, this global time is used to precisely specify the interfaces among the nodes, to simplify the communication and agreement protocols, to perform prompt error detection, and to guarantee the timeliness of real-time applications. The TTA supports a two-phased design methodology, architecture design, and component design. During the architecture design phase, the interactions among the distributed components and the interfaces of the components are fully specified in the value domain and in the temporal domain. In the succeeding component implementation phase, the components are built, taking these interface specifications as constraints. This two-phased design methodology is a prerequisite for the composability of applications implemented in the TTA and for the reuse of prevalidated components within the TTA. This talk presents the architecture model of the TTA, explains the design rationale, discusses the time-triggered communication protocols TTP/C and TT-Ethernet, and illustrates how transparent fault tolerance can be implemented in the TTA.

Speaker Details

Hermann Kopetz received his PhD in physics “sub auspiciis praesidentis” from the University of Vienna, Austria in 1968. He served on the faculty at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, and the Technical University of West-Berlin. He is currently Professor of Software Engineering and Real-Time Systems at the Vienna University of Technology and a full member of the Austrian Academy of Science. He is an IEEE Fellow who chaired the Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing and the IFIP WG 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance. Dr Kopetz has published a widely used textbook on Real-Time Systems and more than 150 papers on the topic of dependable embedded systems. He is the inventor of the time-triggered technology, which recently has been selected by NASA for deployment in the ORION program. Dr. Kopetz is one of the founders of TTTech, a spin-off company established in 1998 and holds more than twenty patents. He received the IEEE Computer Society 2003 Technical Achievement Award for outstanding contributions to the field of safety-critical real-time computing.

Date:
Speakers:
Hermann Kopetz
Affiliation:
Professor of Software Engineering and Real-Time Systems at the Vienna University of Technology