Design and RAMS analysis of a fault-tolerant computer control system

Abstract This paper presents a fault-tolerant computer system. It is designed as a double 2-out-of-2 architecture based on component redundant technique. Also, a quantitative probabilistic model is presented for evaluating the reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) of this architecture. Hierarchical modeling method and Markov modeling method are used in RAMS analysis to evaluate the system characteristics. The double 2-out-of-2 system is compared with the other two systems, all voting triple modular redundancy (AVTMR) system and dual-duplex system. According to the result, the double 2-out-of-2 system has the highest dependability. Especially, the system can satisfy the safety integrity level (SIL) 4, which means the system's probability of catastrophic failure less than or equal to 10 −8 per hour, therefore, it can be applied to life critical systems such as high-speed railway systems.