Hardware and software fault simulation

This paper describes the technique of fault acceleration implementation for analysis of a fault tolerant system based on a transputer network. It is imperative that a fault tolerant system's dependability is validated to ensure that its algorithms and mechanisms have been correctly implemented, and that it provides the required level of service. Hence, to undertake an investigation of fault tolerant approaches, it is necessary to realise a fault injection scheme which provides an acceleration of the occurrence of failures. This is a prerequisite, due to the very low natural failure rate, which makes it practically impossible to validate any fault tolerant mechanism otherwise. The fault injection mechanism was designed for a transputer-based fault tolerant application and is explained in detail. A helicopter flight control simulation is presented as a case study.