A Fault-Tolerant Software Architecture and its Formal Specification for Embedded, Real-Time Interactive Systems

Camille Fayollas (1, 2) , Philippe Palanque (1, 3) , Jean Charles Fabre (2) , David Navarre (1, 4) , Yannick Deleris (5) , Arnaud Hamon (5, 1, 6)

1 IRIT-ICS - Interactive Critical Systems
2 LAAS-TSF - Équipe Tolérance aux fautes et Sûreté de Fonctionnement informatique
3 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
4 UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole
5 AIRBUS Operations Ltd.
6 NASA

Most of the work that has been done to build reliable interactive systems has been focusing on avoiding the occurrence of faults during the development of the system, using for instance formal verification techniques. However, empirical studies have demonstrated that software crashes may occur at runtime, even if the development has been extremely rigorous. One of the many sources of such crashes is called natural faults triggered by alpha-particles from radioactive contaminants in the chips or neutron from cosmic radiation. A higher probability of occurrence of faults concerns systems deployed in the high atmosphere (e.g. aircrafts) or in space (e.g. manned spacecraft). Therefore mechanisms are needed to deal with these faults and guarantee that the system will work correctly even in the presence of these faults. To deal with this issue, this paper proposes a fault-tolerant software architecture and its formal specification applied to embedded, real-time interactive systems.

Mots clés: Dependability; Fault- Tolerant Architecture; Formal Description Techniques; Interactive cockpits; Widgets; Fault Tolerance

Domaines: Systèmes embarqués

Camille Fayollas, Philippe Palanque, Jean Charles Fabre, David Navarre, Yannick Deleris, et al.. A Fault-Tolerant Software Architecture and its Formal Specification for Embedded, Real-Time Interactive Systems. Conference Embedded Real Time Software and Systems (ERTS 2014), 3AF Midi-Pyrénées: the French Society of Aeronautic and Aerospace; SEE: the French Society for Electricity, Electronics, and Information & Communication Technologies., Feb 2014, Toulouse, France. ⟨hal-02272197⟩