Automatic Generation of Safe Diverse Software

Abstract

The importance of safety in the automation industry is continuously increasing even though security makes the headlines at present. Normative safety requirements may result in considerably additional effort at both the hardware and software development. If the certificate depends on the hardware, innovations of hardware components cannot be utilized in general since a new certification process has to be executed. The flexibility is severely limited, and software developed according to the standards cannot be properly transferred to other platforms without additional expense. A new method is presented that applies software-measures based on diverse arithmetic codes for the detection of hardware errors and thus achieving the necessary hardware independence. Furthermore, the method enables the programming of fail-safe applications in high-level programming languages like C.