Checking Fault-Tolerance Properties via Integrity Constraints

Speaker: Ian Hayes

When: 10:00, Monday, 7 June, 2004

Venue: 78-420

Control programs for safety-critical systems are required to tolerate faults in the components they control. Commonly, checking for faults is interspersed with the program for handling the normal case, which has a tendency to complicate and obscure both the normal operation and fault detection code. In this paper we examine a systematic approach to checking for faults based on integrity constraints, which in their simplest form are invariants on the state of the systems variables and its inputs from the environment. More complex integrity constraints may be used to check the validity of state transitions as well as rate-of-progress and temporal validity properties. We argue that handling fault detection via integrity constraints is simpler and more systematic than writing explicit code within the controller, as is usually done. We discuss techniques for efficiently evaluating integrity constraints as well as validating the integrity constraints themselves.
 

Hospitality: Speaker (Ian confirms!)

Contact: Prof Paul Bailes (SSE seminar co-ordinator) (p.bailes@epsa.uq.edu.au)

SSE seminar web page: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~sse/Seminars.html