Survivable Safety-Critical Systems

From Dependability

Software is a human work product, and there is no way to guarantee that it will not contain design flaws. These flaws are much less likely to exist, however, if software is smaller or simpler and thus easier for its designers to comprehend. We are working on transitioning survivability, a concept from the domain of networked systems, to the domain of safety-critical systems. Building survivable systems will allow designers to define core function that can maintain safety but is comprehensible, and use it as a fallback in the event that the fully complex function of a system is no longer maintainable because of some failure in system hardware or the activation of a software design fault.

Selected Papers

• Strunk, Elisabeth A., and John C. Knight

Assured Reconfiguration of Embedded Real-Time Software

Submitted to DSN 2004 (PDF)

• Knight, John C., and Elisabeth A. Strunk

Achieving Critical System Survivability Through Software Architectures

Submitted to Software Architectures for Dependable Systems (PDF)

• Strunk, Elisabeth A., and John C. Knight

Functionality/Dependability Co-design in Real-Time Embedded Software

Workshop on Co-design for Embedded Real-time Systems (CERTS '03), Co-located with the Euromicro International Conference on Real-Time Systems (July 2003) (PDF)