Programming Language Constructs Supporting Fault Tolerance

Abstract

In order to render software viable for highly safety-critical applications, we describe how to incorporate fault tolerance mechanisms into the real-time programming language PEARL. Therefore, we present, classify, evaluate and illustrate known fault tolerance methods for software. We link them together with the requirements of the international standard IEC 61508-3 for functional safety. We contribute PEARL-2020 programming language constructs for fault tolerance methods that need to be implemented by operating systems, and code-snippets as well as libraries for those independent from runtime systems.

Keywords

• fault tolerance
• functional safety
• pearl
• embedded systems
• software engineering