Modular redundancy in a message passing system

Modular redundancy in the form of replicated computations in a concurrent programming model consisting of communicating sequential processes is investigated. Some conditions are given which must always be verified to ensure correctness in the presence of nondeterminism. Then some implementations which satisfy the given conditions are proposed. This approach permits redundant systems to be robust with respect to failures in redundant processors, and also permits the use of software fault tolerance techniques such as N-version programming. The concurrent programming model which has been chosen is based on a set of active entities, i.e. processes, each running in a local protected environment. The processes interact using message passing only.