A Roadmap for Autonomous Fault-Tolerant Systems

An Autonomous Fault-Tolerant System (AFTS) refers to a system that is able to configure its own resources in the presence of permanent defects and spontaneous random faults occurring in its silicon substrate in order to maintain its functionality. This work analyzes how AFTS could be built, specifically focusing on hardware platform dependant issues, and gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in this field, which is still in its infancy. Three technological levels are used for classifying the research efforts conducted to date. By describing the current state-of-the-art and the constraints imposed by current technology, this work tries to envision future trends towards the ultimate objective of achieving a fully-adaptive system capable of modifying its architecture on-the-fly as needed. Finally, the general structure and organization of a Reliable Reconfigurable Real-Time Operating System (R3TOS) is presented. This OS aims at making the aforementioned adaptability easily exploitable by future commercial applications.