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Section: New Results

A Unifying View of Loosely Time-Triggered Architectures

Cyber-Physical Systems require distributed architectures to support safety critical real-time control. Hermann Kopetz' Time-Triggered Architecture (TTA) has been proposed as both an architecture and a comprehensive paradigm for systems architecture, for such systems. TTA offers the programmer a logical discrete time compliant with synchronous programming, together with timing bounds. A clock synchronization protocol is required, unless the local clocks used themselves provide the recquired accuracy. To relax the strict requirements on synchronization imposed by TTA, Loosely Time-Triggered Architectures (LTTA) have been proposed. In LTTA, computation and communication units are all triggered by autonomous, unsynchronized, clocks. Communication media act as shared memories between writers and readers and communication is non blocking. This is at the price of communication artifacts (such as duplication or loss of data), which must be compensated for by using some "LTTA protocol". In [7] we have pursued our previous work by providing a unified presentation of the two variants of LTTA (token- and time-based), with simplified analyses. We compared these two variants regarding performance and robustness and we provide ways to combine them.