Safe software processing by concurrent execution in a real-time operating system

The requirements for safety-related software systems increases rapidly. To detect arbitrary hardware faults, there are applicable coding mechanism, that add redundancy to the software. In this way it is possible to replace conventional multi-channel hardware and so reduce costs. Arithmetic codes are one possibility of coded processing and are used in this approach. A further approach to increase fault tolerance is the multiple execution of certain critical parts of software. This kind of time redundancy is easily realized by the parallel processing in an operating system. Faults in the program flow can be monitored. No special compilers, that insert additional generated code into the existing program, are required. The usage of multi-core processors would further increase the performance of such multi-channel software systems. In this paper we present the approach of program flow monitoring combined with coded processing, which is encapsulated in a library of coded data types. The program flow monitoring is indirectly realized by means of an operating system.