A fault-tolerant architecture for resilient interactive systems

Abstract

Research contributions to improve interactive systems reliability as, for now, mainly focused towards fault occurrence prevention by removing software bugs at development time. However, Interactive Systems complexity is so high that whatever efforts are deployed at development time, faults and failures occur at operation time. Root causes of such failures may be due to transient hardware faults or (when systems are used in high atmosphere) may be so called "natural faults" triggered by alpha particles in processors or neutrons from cosmic radiations. This paper proposes an exhaustive identification of faults to be handled in order to improve interactive systems reliability. As currently no research has been carried out in the field of interactive systems to detect and remove natural faults, this paper proposes a software architecture providing fault-tolerant mechanisms dedicated to interactive systems. More precisely, the paper how such architecture addresses the various component of interactive applications namely widgets, user application and window manager. These concepts are demonstrated through a case study from the domain of interactive cockpits of large civil aircrafts.