Evaluating a Time-Triggered Runtime System by Distributing a Flight Controller

With the recent advancements in the Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0, cyber-physical systems have become increasingly inter-connected. It is becoming a challenge to maintain the same quality-of-control and time-predictability of computation and communication required by safety-critical hard real-time systems as previously achieved through non-distributed architectures. This paper examines the problem of implementing and distributing a closed-loop command-control system over an Ethernet network with guaranteed timing bounds. To achieve bounded communication and computation time, we use an open-source software framework running on the T-CREST platform combined with a TTEthernet network star topology. We evaluate its quality-of-control performance in our experimental setup and compare the results against single-core and multi-core implementations. The proposed distributed time-triggered runtime system executes with jitter below 10µs and can perform a stable flight scenario as verified by the benchmark implementation.