Software-based Monitoring for Calibration of Measurement Units in Real-time Systems

In real-time systems, every task is characterized by its deadline where each task is expected to perform a function producing a correct result within a specified amount of time. A hard real-time system can lead to catastrophic failure if any task misses delivering the correct value at the right time. Although it is very important, most research works in real-time systems avoid discussion on the correctness of values at different points in time. Measurement units or instruments can be integrated with real-time systems to perform sensitive measurements where the measurement accuracy of a device is an essential factor for the precise result. Periodic inspections and calibrations of the measurement units validate the consistent measurement accuracy to ensure the safety of a system. In this paper, we present a software-based monitoring approach for the auto-calibration process that compares sporadically the accuracy of measurement units with the set of determined measurement standards such as National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ensure the correctness of the measurement instruments. This approach will automatically guide us to correct the measurement errors if the electronic devices are unable to perform with expected accuracy. To explain the applicability of our proposed strategy, we define different techniques considering the availability of the calibration standards and finally show an experiment of anomaly detection in a resistive voltage divider as a case study.