COSAFE:efficient safety-critical portable system design approach

Safety-critical systems are becoming quite common nowadays, especially in medical and transportation applications. The targeted safe operation levels of this type of systems are fully defined by the international standards. Low safe-operation levels are met in most medical devices. In this paper, a decentralized design approach is proposed that mimics human body's nervous system structure. This approach allows the achievement of high safe-operation levels that were not targeted before due to the high design complexity and the significant cost increase. A microcontroller was developed and served as the evaluation vehicle of the proposed approach. It was embedded in a commercial volumetric pump as the main core, resulting in a 99.9% and a 98%, permanent and transient fault cover respectively. Furthermore, an extension of the device's autonomy by 36% was achieved.