TAVA in the News! - Year 2000 may hold Embedded Time Bomb EXCERPTS
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Year 2000 failures in embedded systems can come from a number of sources, some very elusive, said Ken Owen, vice president of business development at consultancy TAVA Technologies (Denver).
- This problem can be easy to spot in older systems
- More subtle problems can be equally damaging, and much harder to find
- Even more insidious problems can occur if control systems have been networked to other ..systems
- None of these bugs will submit easily to tools developed for the data-processing arena
"In the corporate world, there are very smart scanning tools that can traverse code, identify references to the date and virtually re-engineer the code to avoid Y2k problems," Owen explained. "In the embedded world, you can't do that. The last thing you want to do is take down every control system in the industrial world and scrub it with some sort of software tool. There are too many systems, and too much variety, and there is often no access to the source code."
Instead, Owen said, operators of mission-critical embedded systems must perform a sort of gambler's triage. The first step is to identify which embedded systems are actually mission-critical, and which would merely pose an inconvenience should they fail.
Next, the mission-critical systems will have to be analyzed to determine their susceptibility to Year 2000 problems. "There are two levels of verification," Owen said. "One is to talk to the original system provider. It may be that the system contains no date information or that the code never uses it. Or the system may use the date for time stamping in probably benign ways.
[....]
Simulation approach: TAVA's solution has been to ally itself with B-Tree, a veteran of system verification in the carefully regulated medical-equipment field.
pubsys.cmp.com
Electronic Engineering Times - Dec '97
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