Modern critical systems bear great responsibilities and face escalating challenges. Distributed systems for critical applications are costly and time-consuming to develop and to certify. Since there is little automated support for early assurance that a system faithfully implements its architectural design and satisfies its requirements, qualification testing and certification processes often reveal deficiencies that require costly late changes. MILS provides compositional system construction and assurance, leveraging individually developed and assured components to predict and assure the properties of composite systems. By providing a modular high-assurance platform and a framework for the certification of systems built on that platform, MILS reduces the cost and time for development, certification, and maintenance of dependable systems.

Distributed MILS relies on extensions to a MILS separation kernel and the addition of a MILS network subsystem using a hardware-based, time-triggered Ethernet “backplane”. It will be possible, for the first time, for an application architecture to seamlessly span multiple computer systems, with scalable deterministic operation over a set of nodes, opening many new practical application areas for MILS. Automated assistance, as being developed and applied in this project, is indispensable for the development and verification of dependable distributed systems. System architects, developers, integrators, installers, operators, and particularly the organizations and populations that depend on critical systems, will benefit from the resulting assurances that many of the sources of errors that lead to added cost and dangerous failures of critical systems can be eliminated.

Results of the Distributed MILS project will establish a common framework for critical system construction and certification, encouraging innovation among component and service suppliers, and leading to improved dependability while reducing the cost to develop, certify and deploy trustworthy critical systems in the EU.

D-MILS is partially funded by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme for Information and Communications Technologies.

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