R3TOS-Based Autonomous Fault-Tolerant Systems

An autonomous fault-tolerant system (AFTS) is one that can reconfigure its own resources in the presence of permanent defects and spontaneous random faults occurring in its silicon substrate in order to maintain the original functionality. This capability makes an AFTS especially suitable for use in harsh environments, where traditional electronics technology is susceptible to failure. This article describes the contributions of the Reliable Reconfigurable Real-Time Operating System (R3TOS) for building an AFTS using currently available Xilinx partially-reconfigurable field-programmable gate arrays. Namely, this article discusses what R3TOS offers for developing durable, dependable, and real-time embedded systems to be used in rugged environments. In this context, the article presents an R3TOS-based inverter controller of a real-world railway traction system that is proven to recover from most of the errors injected without requiring any human intervention.