ASSESSING REQUIRED LEVELS OF REDUNDANCY FOR COMPOSITE SAFETY/MISSION CRITICAL SYSTEMS. IN: CAE METHODS FOR VEHICLE CRASHWORTHINESS AND OCCUPANT SAFETY, AND SAFETY-CRITICAL SYSTEMS

This research investigates and analyzes the concept of "shared redundancy" and its application to the design of architectures that integrate multiple safety/mission critical functions or subsystems. The analysis is based on considering different design alternatives with varying levels of physical redundancy of the components constituting the functions or subsystems. Under a set of assumptions, the authors show that overall system reliability and availability in a shared redundancy based-architecture can be improved without increasing the levels of physical redundancy for the components employed at the subsystem level. However, such an improvement will be limited by the component(s) with the minimal level of redundancy.