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Combining Operational Flexibility and Dependability in FTT-CAN

2006; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1109/tii.2005.875508

1941-0050

Joaquim Ferreira, Luís Almeida, José Fonseca, Paulo Pedreiras, Ernesto Martins, Guillermo Rodríguez-Navas, J M Rigo, Julián Proenza,

Petri Nets in System Modeling

The traditional approaches to the design of distributed safety-critical systems, due to fault-tolerance reasons, have mostly considered static cyclic table-based traffic scheduling. However, there is a growing demand for operational flexibility and integration, mainly to improve efficiency in the use of system resources, with the network playing a central role to support such properties. This calls for dynamic online traffic scheduling techniques so that dynamic communication requirements are adequately supported. Nevertheless, using dynamic traffic management mechanisms raises additional problems, in terms of fault-tolerance, related with the weaker knowledge of the future system state caused by the higher level of operational flexibility. Such problems have been recently addressed in the scope of using flexible time-triggered CAN (FTT-CAN) in safety-critical applications in order to benefit from the high operational flexibility of this protocol. This paper gathers and reviews the main mechanisms that were developed to provide dependability to the protocol, namely, master replication and fail-silence enforcement.