Distributed Fault-Tolerant Avionic Systems - A Real-Time Perspective

TL;DR

This paper explores how to enhance fault-tolerance in safety-critical avionic systems through reconfiguration, enabling higher availability and flexibility in distributed architectures.

Contribution

It proposes a migration path from current avionic architectures to reconfigurable, fault-tolerant systems, addressing development, safety analysis, and configurable kernels.

Findings

Identifies challenges in implementing reconfiguration in avionic systems.

Proposes a migration strategy for integrating fault-tolerance.

Highlights the need for flexible safety and timing analyses.

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of introducing advanced forms of fault-tolerance via reconfiguration into safety-critical avionic systems. This is required to enable increased availability after fault occurrence in distributed integrated avionic systems(compared to static federated systems). The approach taken is to identify a migration path from current architectures to those that incorporate re-configuration to a lesser or greater degree. Other challenges identified include change of the development process; incremental and flexible timing and safety analyses; configurable kernels applicable for safety-critical systems.