A CAD-Based tool for fault tolerant distributed embedded systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a CAD-based tool that automates the design and simulation of fault-tolerant strategies in distributed embedded systems, enhancing reliability and reducing repair times.

Contribution

It presents a novel CAD tool that generates reconfiguration strategies and code for fault tolerance in distributed embedded systems, simplifying design and improving dependability.

Findings

The tool can simulate various fault scenarios and system reliabilities.

It auto-generates control code for system reconfiguration.

Comparison shows advantages over similar existing tools.

Abstract

Reliability and availability analysis are essential in dependable critical embedded systems. The classical implementation of dependability for an embedded system relies on merging both fundamental structures with the required dependability techniques to form one composite structure. The separation of the basic system components from the dependability components, reduces complexity and improves the design. The goal of this work is to assist implementing reconfiguration-based fault tolerance in safety-critical embedded systems applications. The primary intention is to reduce the repair time in order to enhance fault tolerance and produce dependable embedded systems. The proposed solution is a dedicated CAD-tool designed to generate a reference strategy for the system manager of a distributed embedded system to control and automatically reconfigure the processing elements of the system. The proposed tool auto-generates program codes to be executed by a system manager to govern the DES. It also computes different reliability solutions with necessary supporting calculated parameters and graphs sorted to support the fault tolerance design of the system. The proposed tool can be used to simulate possible configurations based on the desired degrees of faults and system reliability. The graphical interface of the tool is unique and hides the complexity of the systems underneath. A comparison with a similar tool is presented.