Tolerance of design faults

Abstract

The idea that diverse or dissimilar computations could be used to detect errors can be traced back to Dynosius Lardner's analysis of Babbage's mechanical computers in the early 19th century. In the modern era of electronic computers, diverse redundancy techniques were pioneered in the 1970's by Elmendorf, Randell, Avižienis and Chen. Since then, the tolerance of design faults has been a very active research topic, which has had practical impact on real critical applications. In this paper, we present a brief history of the topic and then describe two contemporary studies on the application of diversity in the fields of robotics and security. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.