A fail-safe infrastructure designed for COTS component used in safety critical system

Abstract

To deal with the ever-growing system complexity and project costs associated with the development of safety critical systems, the adoption of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) components is becoming more and more attractive to system designers and developers. However, in most cases such COTS components are not designed with stringent timing and/or safety requirements as priorities. As a result, safety may be impaired when integrating these COTS products into safety critical systems. This paper presents a fail-safe infrastructure which extends proven safety techniques to COTS-Based Systems (CBS). By treating COTS components as “black boxes”, the system can implement “Recovery” or “Shut Down” procedure to the COTS component which is subject to transient or some permanent faults. In this works, the architecture of the fail-safe system is introduced and how the system behaves under such fault circumstances is described.