Development of dependable real-time systems with Zerberus

Although the main fault-tolerance techniques are known for a long time, there exists no consistent approach for implementing dependable applications in the sense that the fault-tolerance mechanisms are generated automatically by development tools. With the Zerberus system we developed such a tool. The main concept of Zerberus is the platform independent specification of the functional model (application tasks, interaction with environment, temporal constraints) by the developer using the Zerberus language. Based on this functional model the code for the fault-tolerance mechanisms is generated automatically for the desired platform using pre-implemented templates. Due to this automatic code generation the development process is accelerated and the developers are enabled to implement dependable application without expert knowledge of fault-tolerance techniques. Our approach offers also the possibility to accelerate the certification process by using certified templates for the fault-tolerance mechanisms.