Timing Overhead Analysis for Fault Tolerance Mechanisms

Abstract: The growing complexity of safety-critical embedded systems is leading to an increased complexity of safety analysis models. Often used fault tolerance mecha-nisms have complex failure behavior and produce overhead compared to systems with-out such mechanisms. The question arises whether the overhead for fault tolerance is acceptable for the increased safety of a system. In this paper, an approach is presented that uses safety analysis models of fault tolerance mechanisms and execution times of its subcomponents to generate failure dependent execution times. This provides a detailed view on the safety behavior in combination with the produced overhead and allows a trade-off analysis to find appropriate fault tolerance mechanisms.