Design and reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety analysis of a high availability quadruple vital computer system

Abstract

With the development of high-speed railways in China, more than 2000 high-speed trains will be put into use. Safety and efficiency of railway transportation is increasingly important. We have designed a high availability quadruple vital computer (HAQVC) system based on the analysis of the architecture of the traditional double 2-out-of-2 system and 2-out-of-3 system. The HAQVC system is a system with high availability and safety, with prominent characteristics such as fire-new internal architecture, high efficiency, reliable data interaction mechanism, and operation state change mechanism. The hardware of the vital CPU is based on ARM7 with the real-time embedded safe operation system (ES-OS). The Markov modeling method is designed to evaluate the reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety (RAMS) of the system. In this paper, we demonstrate that the HAQVC system is more reliable than the all voting triple modular redundancy (AVTMR) system and double 2-out-of-2 system. Thus, the design can be used for a specific application system, such as an airplane or high-speed railway system.