Timing Overhead Analysis for Fault Tolerance Mechanisms

The growing complexity of safety-critical embedded systems is leading to an increased complexity of safety analysis models. Often used fault tolerance mechanisms have complex failure behavior and produce overhead compared to systems without 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.