Verifying Hardening Techniques for Distributed Electronic Systems in Critical Applications

Distributed Electronic Systems used for executing concurrently intensive data acquisition (sensing) and control tasks (actuating) are spread thorough several applications. Health-care, automotive, communications, space and other industries are developing and including these systems because of their competitiveness in terms of cost, performance and reliability. Robustness of distributed electronic systems against ionizing radiation is often estimated based upon single nodes reliabilities. In this paper a proposal is presented for on-line reporting the SEU/SEFI appearance on these systems, while checking the self-recovery capability of the system and its components.