SAFURE partners are involved in the Technical Sessions “Timing Verification” and “Design and Methods” at the ETFA 2016. The conference took place from September 6th – 9th in Berlin, Germany.

The ETFA conference series is the prime and largest, IEEE-sponsored event dedicated to factory automation and emerging technologies in industrial automation. The aim of the ETFA conference series is to provide researchers and practitioners from industry and academia with a platform to report on recent developments in the newly emerging areas of technology and their potential applications to factory automation. The proceedings of the conference give a fairly accurate picture of the state of the art of the area. ETFA conferences were fortunate to attract high quality papers, many of which were later published in the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. For more information please visit the ETFA 2016 website.

The SAFURE partner TUBS held a keynote lecture and submitted a paper which won the “Best Paper Award in Emerging Technologies”. Below you can find the abstracts to dive right into the topic:

Keynote lecture: Automotive Ethernet – Opportunities and Pitfalls (by Prof. Dr. Rolf Ernst)

The automotive industry is undergoing major changes. Automatic driving, electro mobility, and wireless connectivity are changing automotive technology at the same time, more than any other innovation over decades of automotive history. Automotive embedded systems are at the core of this development facing new challenges to performance, safety and security. Embedded systems technology is answering with a transition from traditional single core microcontrollers to multi- and manycore systems, and with new network architectures. Today, Switched Ethernet is generally accepted as the future automotive backbone technology. Switched Ethernet provides a great opportunity to improve performance and control cost, but is not without risk when it comes to functional safety. Such risks are not limited to protocol and communication stacks but include switch and gateway implementations as well as individual car network configurations. The presentation will start with an overview on the use of Switched Ethernet in time and safety critical applications before it summarizes potential shortcomings when applied to safety critical systems, such as violations of freedom from interference which equally affect safety and security. The talk will show that the obstacles can generally be mitigated when using a holistic design approach starting from the concept phase to verification to monitoring in the field thereby avoiding unnecessary communication complexity.


Paper: Formal Worst-Case Performance Analysis of Time-Sensitive Ethernet with Frame Preemption (Authors: Daniel Thiele and Rolf Ernst)

One of the key challenges in future Ethernet-based automotive and industrial networks is the low-latency transport of time-critical data. To date, Ethernet frames are sent non- preemptively. This introduces a major source of delay, as, in the worst-case, a latency-critical frame might be blocked by a frame of lower priority, which started transmission just before the latency-critical frame. The upcoming IEEE 802.3br standard will introduce Ethernet frame preemption to address this problem. While high-priority traffic benefits from preemption, lower- priority (yet still latency-sensitive) traffic experiences a certain overhead, impacting its timing behavior. In this paper, we present a formal timing analysis for Ethernet to derive worst-case latency bounds under preemption. We use a realistic automotive Ethernet setup to analyze the worst-case performance of standard Ethernet and Ethernet TSN under preemption and also compare our results to non-preemptive implementations of these standards.