Resiliency Demands on Next Generation Critical Embedded Systems

Emerging intelligent systems have stringent constraints including cost and power consumption. When they are used in critical applications, resiliency becomes another key requirement. Much research into techniques for fault tolerance and dependability has been successfully applied to highly critical systems, such as those used in space, where cost is not an overriding constraint. Further, most resiliency techniques were focused on dealing with failures in the hardware and bugs in the software. The next generation of systems used in critical applications will also have to be tolerant to test escapes after manufacturing, soft errors and transients in the electronics, hardware bugs, hardware and software Trojans and viruses, as well as intrusions and other security attacks during operation. This paper will assess the impact of these threats on the results produced by a critical system, and proposed solutions to each of them. It is argued that run-time checks at the application-level are necessary to deal with errors in the results.