Fault tolerant scheduling - dual redundancy in an automotive cruise control system

Abstract

Safety Critical real time systems are required to meet high reliability requirements, stringent deadlines and temporal demands. Such demands are met with fault tolerant mechanisms for applications like automotive, space and avionics systems. For such safety critical systems, to ensure the success of systems, various redundancy schemes are built into hard real-time systems. In this paper, a dual redundant scheme with active hot standby system has been employed in a Cruise Control System. A framework based on a paradigm for fault tolerance to provide adaptive fault tolerance scheduling of tasks in a DAG of the CCS is proposed. The scheme when implemented gives an efficient offline task scheduling, adaptive online dynamic reconfiguration of resources for single point of failure and guarantees functional and timing correctness of essential tasks. Efficient use of the redundant resources under fault free conditions and fail safe mechanism for fault ensures full functionality and enhanced performance. The comparative evaluation with a typical traditional dual system with performance metric highlights the enhanced performance and the importance of this work for the automotive industry.