Towards an FDIR Software Fault Tree Library for Onboard Computers

Abstract

The increasing complexity of space missions, their software architectures, and hardware that has to meet the demands for those missions, imposes numerous new challenges for many engineering disciplines such as reliability engineering. Affected by the ever growing demand for more onboard computation power are the onboard computers. They in return require Fault Detection, Isolation, and Recovery (FDIR) architectures to support their fault tolerant operation in the harsh environment of space. Especially high performance commercial processing units face the challenge of dealing with negative radiation effects, which may significantly degrade their operation. To design performant and fault tolerant onboard computers, it is of high interest to assess the effectiveness of the FDIR architecture in the early phase of system design. This can be achieved using Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). However, to create complete fault trees manually is an error prone and labor intensive task. In this paper, the methodology for assessing the FDIR design of onboard computers in space systems, presented in [1], is refined by introducing a library of FDIR routines. The routines are modeled using fault trees and are composed into a software system fault tree using a basic fault model and a design configuration chosen by the reliability engineer. To assess the configurations, we give a heuristic based on a factor-criteria-metric model. We demonstrate the feasability of our approach on the basis of a case study on the rover of the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. Several FDIR configurations are studied and fault trees are generated for them. For the chosen case study, we obtain a reduction of up to 80% in terms of modeling effort.