Output Consolidation

Abstract

Output consolidation is concerned with the mapping of multiple redundant outputs into a single physical effect on the controlled process. The diversity of the targeted applications and their various dependability objectives leads to different instantiations of the generic architecture with different consolidation strategies for safety-critical and safety-related outputs. The generic output consolidation mechanism presented in this chapter proposes, for safety-related outputs, a cost-effective complement to the application-specific voters necessary for safety-critical outputs. Since a single instance of the architecture may host applications with different criticality levels, it may in fact have both a generic output consolidation mechanism for safety-related outputs and application-specific voters for safety-critical outputs.