Monitoring Distributed Real-Time Systems: A Survey and Future Directions

Monitoring Distributed Real-Time Systems: A Survey and Future DirectionsAlwyn Goodloe (NIA) and Lee Pike (Galois, Inc), NASA Langley Research Center, 2010.

Runtime monitors have been proposed as a means to increase the reliability of safety-critical systems. In particular, we explore runtime monitors for distributed hard real-time systems, such as fault-tolerant data buses and control systems for avionics and spacecraft. This class of systems has had little attention from the monitoring community. We motivate the need for monitors by discussing examples of avionic systems failure. We then describe work in the field of runtime monitoring. We present potential monitoring architectures for distributed real-time systems, and then we discuss how those architectures might be used to monitor properties of real-time distributed systems.