WinFT: using off-the-shelf computers on industrial environments

Using off-the-shelf hardware and software in factory computer systems is one attractive way of increasing flexibility and reducing costs in development, maintenance and training. However, targeting factory critical applications for the low-end PC market and general-purpose operating systems such as Microsoft Windows 95/NT poses some problems. These applications are usually required to run 24 hours a day and demand high availability and data integrity. Using systems without any fault tolerance support is unreliable and dangerous. This article presents a software framework, named WinFT, which provides fault tolerance support for Windows applications. WinFT performs automatic detection and restart of failed processes, diagnostic and reboot of a malfunctioning or strangled operating system, checkpointing and recovery of critical volatile data and preventive actions such as software rejuvenation