A Generic Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Real-Time Dependable Systems PDF

The design of computer systems to be embedded in critical real-time applications is a complex task.

Such systems must not only guarantee to meet hard real-time deadlines imposed by their physical environment, they must guarantee to do so dependably, despite both physical faults (in hardware) and design faults (in hardware or software).

A fault-tolerance approach is mandatory for these guarantees to be commensurate with the safety and reliability requirements of many life- and mission-critical applications.

This book explains the motivations and the results of a collaborative project', whose objective was to significantly decrease the lifecycle costs of such fault- tolerant systems.

The end-user companies participating in this project already deploy fault-tolerant systems in critical railway, space and nuclear-propulsion applications.

However, these are proprietary systems whose architectures have been tailored to meet domain-specific requirements.

This has led to very costly, inflexible, and often hardware-intensive solutions that, by the time they are developed, validated and certified for use in the field, can already be out-of-date in terms of their underlying hardware and software technology.