A Flexible Task Design For Industrial Embedded Systems

The run-time context in industrial embedded systems varies from bare-metal microcontrollers, to multicore-processors running real-time operating systems. Due to the longevity of industrial systems, reusability and evolvability are often considered crucial quality attributes. This paper presents a new flexible task design that enables tasks to be agnostic to run-time context. Evaluations of the design were made by conducting experiments using a proof of concept implementation of the proposed design. The experiments were based on typical industrial constructs, such as periodic tasks, and event signaling from interrupts. Findings from the experiments show that tasks can be more agnostic to run-time context and still deliver functionality normally used within industry. The results indicate that it is feasible to improve reusability and evolvability between different run-time contexts, and in addition, support hybrid configurations that can reduce resource usage, since e.g. a thread can be easily shared among several tasks.