The fault-tolerant architecture of the safe system

Abstract This paper presents a fault-tolerant architecture for industrial control applications aiming at achieving fault-tolerance with low redundancy rates by means of new error detection mechanisms, efficient reconfiguration schemes, and a cost effective use of dynamic redundancy techniques. The paper also stresses some novel aspects of this architecture such as a new method for fast stable-storage implementation and the use of a new approach to concurrent system-level error detection based on signature monitoring. This new error detection scheme has the potential to detect a larger kind of errors than traditional signature monitoring approaches. Furthermore, this new approach does not require special assemblers and loaders as is the case with the already existing techniques.

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