A dependable distributed architecture for a safety critical hard real-time system

For many years the real-time and safety practitioners have faced the challenge of trying to verify the timing characteristics of systems that have been designed with little consideration of timing. Part of our work has assessed the key characteristics of system architectures, considered the pros and cons of various design solutions, and selected a favoured option. When all the characteristics have been considered then an overall architecture was formed containing our chosen options. This paper presents that overall framework with some of the reasons why it was chosen.