A Fault Hypothesis for Integrated Architectures

Abstract

Integrated architectures in the automotive and avionic domain promise improved resource utilization and enable a better tactic coordination of application subsystems compared to federated systems. In order to support safety-critical application subsystems, an integrated architecture needs to support fault-tolerant strategies that enable the continued operation of the system in the presence of failures. The basis for the implementation and validation of fault-tolerant strategies is a fault hypothesis that identifies the fault containment regions, specifies the failure modes and provides realistic failure rate assumptions. This paper describes a fault hypothesis for integrated architectures, which takes into account the collocation of multiple software components on shared node computers. We argue in favor of a differentiation of fault containment regions for hardware and software faults. In addition, the fault hypothesis describes the assumptions concerning the respective frequencies of transient and permanent failures in consideration of recent semiconductor trends.