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

By David Powell

Book Overview

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solutions that, by the time they are developed, validated and certified for use in the field, can already be out-of-date in terms of their underlying hardware and software technology.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1441948805
• ISBN13: 9781441948809
• Release Date: December 2010
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"