Simulation and Analysis of In-Orbit Applications under Radiation Effects on COTS Platforms

Radiation effects research is crucial as it defines risk to both human bodies and spacecraft. Employing radiation-hardened products is one way to mitigate radiation effects on in-orbit systems. However, radiation effects prohibit most of the state-of-the-art commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies from use in space. Furthermore, radiation effects on software components are less studied compared to hardware components. In this work, we introduce a simulation tool that simulates and performs post-simulation analysis of the impact of radiation effects on schedulability of the software task sets that execute on COTS system-on-chip (SoC) platforms within in-orbit systems. In order to provide a meaningful verification environment, single-event effects (SEEs) are introduced as aleatory disturbances characterized by probability distribution of occurrence using their predefined models. The tool supports interoperability with several other tools as it uses the extensible markup language (XML) model files for input and output, i.e., for importing input task sets and radiation effects and exporting the simulation and analysis results. The proposed tool is extensively by running simulations using a use case of an in-orbit onboard monitoring system.