Distributed fault-tolerant avionic systems - A real-time perspective

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.