Research Projects

Since 2004 Rapita has played an active role in collaborative research projects with a wide range of partner organisations. Please read on for examples of the pioneering, thought provoking projects which are helping to develop the technologies of the future.

ParMERASA: Multi-Core Execution of Parallelised Hard Real-Time Applications

A Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) project of the European Union, parMERASA focuses on the potential for increased performance and safety benefits when hard real-time applications are run in parallel on an embedded multi-core processor.

PRESTO: Improvements of industrial real-time embedded systems development process

The PRESTO project (ARTEMIS-2010-1-269362) is co-funded by the European Commission under the ARTEMIS Joint Undertaking Programme.

Dedicated to improving test-based embedded systems development and validation, PRESTO is based on the integration of: a) test traces exploitation b) platform models and c) design space exploration techniques.

The project is expected to demonstrate how functional and performance analysis and platform optimisation can be established in the early stages of design development.

PROARTIS: PRObabilistic Analyzable Real TIme Systems

PROARTIS is a small or medium scale focused research project (STREP) funded in part by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

The aim of PROARTIS is to define new hardware and software architecture paradigms whose timing behavior can be analyzed with probabilistic techniques. These new paradigms move towards design principles that make both the execution environment and the RTOS aware of the hardware. At the same time, the application programmer is freed from dealing with hardware issues.

COLA (Cache Optimizations for LEON Analyses)

COLA (Cache Optimizations for LEON Analyses) is a research project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) under the basic Technology Research Programme (TRP). COLA is a follow-on project to PEAL2 (Prototype Execution-time Analyser for LEON). The purpose of COLA is to investigate how software running on a processor with cache can achieve maximum performance while remaining testable, predictable and analyzable. This work is being done with particular reference to the LEON, which is widely used in space applications.

FRESCOR: Framework for Real-time Embedded Systems based on COntRacts

Frescor is a consortium research project funded in part by the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme.

The main objective of the Frescor project is to develop the enabling technology and infrastructure required to effectively use the most advanced techniques developed for real-time applications with flexible scheduling requirements, in embedded systems design methodologies and tools, providing the necessary elements to target reconfigurable processing modules and reconfigurable distributed architectures.

MERASA (Multi-Core Execution of Hard Real-Time Applications)

MERASA is a European Union Framework 7 research project, investigating the design of systems for worst case execution time analysis.

The MERASA project will develop multi-core processor designs (from 2 to 16 cores) for hard real-time embedded systems hand in hand with timing analysis techniques and tools to guarantee the analysability and predictability regarding timing of every single feature provided by the processor.

ALL-TIMES: Integrating European Timing Analysis Technology

ALL-TIMES is a medium-scale focused-research project within the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme on Research, Technological Development and Demonstration.

The ALL-TIMES project is concerned with embedded systems that are subject to safety, availability, reliability, and performance requirements. More often than not, these requirements relate to correct timing, most notably in the automotive and aerospace areas. Consequently, the need for appropriate timing analysis methods and tools is rapidly growing.