Non-Intrusive System Level Fault-Tolerance

Abstract

High-integrity embedded systems operate in multiple modes, in order to ensure system availability in the face of faults. Unanticipated state-dependent faults that remain in software after system design and development behave like hardware transient faults: they appear, do the damage and disappear. The conventional approach used for handling task overruns caused by transient faults is to use a single recovery task that implements minimal functionality. This approach provides limited availability and should be used as a last resort in order to keep the system online. Traditional fault detection approaches are often intrusive in that they consume processor resources in order to monitor system behavior. This paper presents a novel approach for fault-monitoring by leveraging the Ravenscar profile, model-checking and a system-on-chip implementation of both the kernel and an execution time monitor. System fault-tolerance is provided through a hierarchical set of operational modes that are based on timing behavior violations of individual tasks within the application. The approach is illustrated through a simple case study of a generic navigation system.