The PDCS Implementation of MARS Hardware and Software

MARS (MAintainable Real-time System) has been developed at the Vienna University of Technology during the last decade with the aim of managing highly critical distributed control applications. It is based on a periodic, time triggered structure and a fail-silent behaviour of the processing nodes. To validate the concept we have designed and implemented hardware components along with an operating system which are both tailored to the specific needs of MARS. This paper presents our solutions to the problems of achieving a deterministic timing behaviour and the fail-silence property of processing nodes. The integral development of hardware and operating system gave us the opportunity to implement specific features either in hardware or in software, allowing a very efficient design which has proved to be good in practice for more than two years.