A Generalised Error Model and Schedulability Guarantees for Dependable Real-Time Systems

The fundamental requirement for the design of effective and efficient fault-tolerance mechanisms in dependable real-time systems is a realistic and applicable model of potential faults, their manifestations and consequences. Fault and error models also need to be evolved based on the changes in the environments of usage or even based on technological advances. In this paper we propose a novel probabilistic burst error model in lieu of the commonly used simplistic fault assumptions. We introduce an approach to reason about real-time systems schedulability under the proposed error model in a probabilistic manner. We first present a sufficient analysis that accounts for the worst case interference caused by error bursts on the response times of tasks scheduled under the fixed priority scheduling (FPS) policy. Further, we identify potential sources of pessimism in the calculations and propose an algorithm that refines the results.