FORTS: Fault Tolerance in Real-Time systems through Scheduling

FORTS:
Fault Tolerance in Real-Time Systems
Through Scheduling

This is a joint project between Honeywell Technology Center (HTC) and Department of Computer Science, University of Pittsburgh, and is funded by DARPA / ITO Embeddable Systems Program.

The Investigators of the project at HTC are: The Principal Investigators of the project are:

Introduction

The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is conducting research on scheduling techniques for real-time systems to ensure that task deadlines continue to be met in the presence of faults. The algorithms under study offer the opportunity to increase the reliability/availability of real-time applications without incurring the overhead of large-scale hardware redundancy. The Honeywell Technology Center (HTC) will support the research effort at Pitt by identifying real-time applications that can be expected to benefit from the algorithms. This will be based on HTC's experience both with real-time applications produced by the various Honeywell operating divisions and with real-time scheduling technology.

Tasks for the subcontract

The following tasks will be performed as a part of the subcontract:

Task 1 - Application Study

Several existing real-time applications will be considered for applicability of the fault tolerant scheduling techniques developed at Pitt. This information will be used as input for the development of modified scheduling algorithms at Pitt.

Task 2 - Feedback to Pitt

For each application studied as a part of Task 1, the assumptions made by Pitt research will be considered. The assumptions that need to be relaxed to adapt the research for realistic applications will be listed. The reasons for requiring the modification to the assumptions will also be stated.

Task 3 - Evaluate ongoing research at Pitt

Honeywell will evaluate the potential for incorporating new algorithms developed at the University of Pittsburgh and their corresponding assumptions in existing and future versions of Honeywell products and applications.

Task 4 - Define a Demonstration

One application will be studied in greater depth and a demonstration showing the benefits of using the approaches developed at Pitt for the selected application will be specified. Honeywell will specify a task set to be used for this demonstration that provides a realistic, but minimal subset of the typical functions of the application class.

Task 5 - Implement Demonstration Task Software Modules

Honeywell will implement a set of application software modules for the demonstration defined in Task 4. These application modules will be representative of the specified application with respect to input/output behavior and scheduling constraints. They will be designed to be compatible with the fault recovery algorithms developed at Pitt.


Contact Information

Sunondo Ghosh
Honeywell Technology Center,
3660 Technology Drive, MN65-2600
Minneapolis, MN 55418-1006
Email: sghosh@htc.honeywell.com
Phone: (612) 951-7513
Fax: (612) 951-7438