Review of Software Fault-Tolerance Methods for Reliability Enhancement of Real-Time Software Systems

Abstract

Real time systems are those systems which must guarantee to response correctly within strict time constraint or within deadline. Failures can arise from both functional errors as well as timing bugs. Hence, it is necessary to provide temporal correctness of programs used in real time applications in addition to providing functional correctness. Although, there are several researches concerned with achieving fault tolerance in the presence of various functional and operational errors but many of them did not address the problem concerned with the timing bugs which is an important issue in real time systems. As for real time systems, many times it becomes a necessity for a given service to be delivered within the specified time deadline. Therefore, this paper reviews the existing approaches from the perspective of real time systems to analyse the shortcomings of these approaches to present a versatile and cost effective approach in the presence of timing bugs for providing fault tolerance to enhance the reliability of the real time software applications.

An Agent-Based Fault Tolerance Mechanism for Dependable Medical Systems

“…Data or services (Alrajei & Fu, 2014;Chetan, Ranganathan, & Campbell, 2005) may also be duplicated to ensure their availability. In the context of the replication of code, n-version programming (Verma, Guleria, & Lakhanpal, 2014) is used. These solutions may be useful in that the execution in a different manner (different architecture and paradigm) will certainly have a different probability for the simultaneous appearance of the same kind of faults.…”

“…The concepts of re-initialization, reconfiguration, roll-back points, and recovery blocks (Verma, Guleria, & Lakhanpal, 2014;Mushtaq, Al-Ars, & Bertels, 2011;Kushwah, Goyal & Narwariya, 2014) are used in combination-for example, when a fault occurs, a recovery block is used to recover from the faulty code and a healthy state of the system is referenced using a checkpoint and a roll-back point. These two last tools must be used carefully due to coordination problems, even in the case of a distributed system.…”

“…Software solutions to fault tolerance were proposed in (Saha, 2006;Mushtaq, Al-Ars, & Bertels, 2011;Verma, Guleria, & Lakhanpal, 2014). Saha (Saha, 2006) has presented the earliest works (from 1966 to 2006) ones of several that have been proposed in the literature, the first ones are considered to be less adaptable.…”

“…The computer science literature has proposed two types of techniques for ensuring dependability (Lamport, Robert, & Marshall, 1982;Narasimhan et al, 2005;Kolbeck, Högqvist, Stender, & Hupfeld, 2011;Kavila et al, 2013;Verma, Guleria & Lakhanpal, 2014;Karimi et al, 2015;Mittal, & Vetter, 2016;Blanke, Kinnaert, Lunze, Staroswiecki, 2016):…”