Representing Design Tradeoffs in Safety-Critical Systems

Different fault-tolerance strategies have been shown to be effective at achieving fail-safe behavior in a number of safety-critical application domains with different dependability, service, and cost requirements. A technique for comparing the domain profiles and their fault-tolerance strategies could assist architects of new safety-critical systems in choosing an appropriate fault-tolerance strategy. We suggest an approach using Kiviat graphs to visually represent the dependability, service, and cost profile of a system, and show how such a graph can be used to analyze automotive x-by-wire applications.