Reliability Prediction of Fault Tolerant Automotive Systems

This paper discusses a methodology for calculating the probability of a redundant system to fail in a specified time interval after a first fault has occurred. That probability is first derived in general and then specified for a system consisting of independent components having exponential failure rate densities. Four different redundant system configurations of a safety relevant automotive control system are discussed and compared with respect to their reliability characteristics. The four configurations differ in system topologies as well as the intelligence of the system components with respect to self-monitoring.