Experimental evaluation of time-redundant execution for a brake-by-wire application

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of a brake-by-wire application that tolerates transient faults by temporal error masking. A specially designed real-time kernel that masks errors by triple time-redundant execution and voting executes the application on a fail-stop computer node. The objective is to reduce the number of node failures by masking errors at the computer node level. The real-time kernel always executes the application twice to detect errors, and ensures that a fail-stop failure occurs if there is not enough CPU-time available for a third execution and voting. Fault injection experiments show that temporal error masking reduced the number of fail-stop failures by 42% compared to executing the brake-by-wire task without time redundancy.