Introduction and Overview

Abstract

The development and validation of fault-tolerant systems for critical real-time applications are currently both costly and time-consuming. Most such systems developed until now have been specialised to meet the particular requirements of the application domain for which they were targeted. This specialisation has led to very costly, inflexible, and often hardware-intensive solutions that, by the time they are developed, validated and certified for use in the field, can already be out-of-date in terms of their underlying hardware and software technology. This problem is exacerbated in application domains that require the systems to be deployed for several decades, i.e., almost an order of magnitude longer than the typical lifetime of a generation of computing technology. Furthermore, it is currently very difficult to re-use the results of previous fault-tolerance developments when building new products.