Grants and Contributions:

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Title:

A reliability testing framework for the QNX neutrino real-time operating system

Agreement Number:

CRDPJ

Agreement Value:

$44,700.00

Agreement Date:

Mar 7, 2018 -

Organization:

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Location:

Ontario, CA

Reference Number:

GC-2017-Q4-01150

Agreement Type:

Grant

Report Type:

Grants and Contributions

Additional Information:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2019-2020).

Recipient's Legal Name:

Mahmoud, Qusay (University of Ontario Institute of Technology)

Program:

Collaborative Research and Development Grants - Project

Program Purpose:

QNX Neutrino is a real-time operating system (RTOS) that is widely popular in the embedded systems domain, and it's being used in many safety-critical domains ranging from medical systems to automotive systems. Due to the increasing use of QNX Neutrino in a variety of applications and with the rise of Internet of Things (IoT), providing additional measures to ensure higher reliability is anticipated to avoid failures that may cause fatal consequences. Validating the reliability of a RTOS is considered as one of the most challenging tasks. Some activities associated with the validity of a real-time operating system are: (1) formal modeling and proving the properties; (2) automatically test operating systems; and (3) runtime monitoring. Formal modeling is proven to be an effective approach but has the limitations of verification scopes and coverage. Automatic testing and runtime monitoring can effectively increase the robustness but a common challenge in both of these approaches is the need to validate the techniques used for verification. To this end, the objective of this project is to design and implement a reliability testing framework featuring techniques to validate the reliability with value-added enhancements to the QNX Neutrino RTOS. We plan to use a fault injection method to deliberately introduce faults in the system to check whether it can handle the consequences and verify robustness. Such fault injection methodologies need to be applied extensively to increase the confidence of using QNX Neutrino in safety-critical applications.x000D
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The QNX Neutrino RTOS is expected to play a key role in IoT creating dramatic business opportunities in emerging markets in autonomous vehicles, avionics, medical devices, and modern software for nuclear operations. This collaborative research & development (R&D) project will provide solutions to BlackBerry QNX Netruino RTOS and train highly qualified personnel to meet the increasing demand for a skilled workforce in the above emerging markets that utilize real-time operating systems.