On the development of fault-tolerant on-board control software and its evaluation by fault injection

As commercial drivers promote the integration of functions of different criticality into a limited set of processing elements, software plays an increasingly important role on board today's satellites. This trend questions the adequacy of the traditional development process and calls for a design and validation approach capable of achieving the required dependability without blowing the development costs. This paper reports on the most innovative features of an integrated project aimed at designing a software-intensive fault tolerance approach suitable for embedded flight control systems, and at assessing its efficiency by means of a non-intrusive software-implemented fault injection prototype tool.<>