Military Fault Tolerant Requirements

Abstract

The DoD is entering a radically new era of weapon systems procurement. The Cold War is over and new scenarios and new force structures are changing the requirements of the next generation of weapon systems. The major drivers shaping this new era of weapon system procurement are: decreasing military budgets, stretched out development cycles, an emphasis on prototypes and demonstrations, open systems standards, and intensive modeling and simulation before any hardware is built. The next generation of computer based weapon systems will be designed using a high percentage of commercial off-the-shelf parts. A key focus in this next generation of computer based weapon systems will be the fault tolerant features of the system’s design. Studies have shown that a system can actually be more dependable, even though it uses less reliable parts, if adequate attention is paid to the fault handling features of the system’s design. [1]