Application of curiosity driven exploration methods for hardware interference identification
Abstract: The transition from single-core to multi-core architectures in safety-critical embedded systems introduces significant challenges due to inter-core interference caused by contention for shared hardware resources. Such interference affects execution times and complicates the verification of strict temporal requirements, particularly in domains such as avionics where standards require comprehensive identification of interference sources. Existing interference analysis approaches, whether manual or model-based, struggle to capture the full range of behaviors arising from the complex interactions among micro-architectural components. In this paper, we frame multi-core interference analysis as the exploration of a complex system behavior space. We propose the use of curiosity-driven exploration algorithms from artificial intelligence to systematically and efficiently cover the space of possible interference behaviors. Using a simulator-based environment, we show that the proposed approach achieves broader and more uniform behavioral coverage within a limited experimental budget compared to traditional pseudo-random program generation methods.