FAILSAFE Health Management for Embedded Systems

The FAILSAFE project is developing concepts and prototype implementations for software health management in mission-critical, real-time embedded systems. The project unites features of the industry-standard ARINC 653 Avionics Application Software Standard Interface and JPL’s Mission Data System (MDS) technology (see figure). The ARINC 653 standard establishes requirements for the services provided by partitioned, real-time operating systems. The MDS technology provides a state analysis method, canonical architecture, and software framework that facilitates the design and implementation of software-intensive complex systems. The MDS technology has been used to provide the health management function for an ARINC 653 application implementation. In particular, the focus is on showing how this combination enables reasoning about, and recovering from, application software problems.