First Description of a Self-Reconfigurable Infrastructure for Critical Adaptive Distributed Embedded Systems

Adaptive systems, apart from fulfilling some functional requirements, can modify their behaviour autonomously and dynamically to cope with new operational requirements or conditions. The DFT4FTT project aims at providing a self-reconfigurable infrastructure that can support distributed applications with real-time, reliability and adaptivity requirements. This paper describes the architecture and the set of mechanisms that make it possible to: monitor the environment and the system itself, decide when a new configuration is needed, decide on a new valid configuration and apply said configuration. Finally, note that this self-reconfiguration capabilities are not only interesting from a functional perspective, but from a reliability perspective as new we can implement dynamic fault-tolerance mechanisms. In this regard, DFT4FTT implements a N-Modular Redundancy scheme with spares, that increases the system reliability if it is used from the very beginning of the mission.