Stanford Database Library of American Journal of Applied Science and Technology

Vol. 5 No. 09 (2025)
Articles

Architectural and Cross-Layer Fault Tolerance for Safety-Critical High-Performance Computing Systems in Automotive and Cyber-Physical Domains

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  • Dr. Michael J. Reinhardt
Dr. Michael J. Reinhardt
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rheinland Technical University, Germany

Published 2025-09-30

Keywords

  • Fault tolerance,
  • safety-critical systems,
  • lockstep architectures,
  • automotive computing

How to Cite

Dr. Michael J. Reinhardt. (2025). Architectural and Cross-Layer Fault Tolerance for Safety-Critical High-Performance Computing Systems in Automotive and Cyber-Physical Domains. Stanford Database Library of American Journal of Applied Science and Technology, 5(09), 135–141. Retrieved from https://oscarpubhouse.com/index.php/sdlajast/article/view/70

Copyright (c) 2025 Dr. Michael J. Reinhardt

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

The increasing reliance on high-performance processors within safety-critical domains such as automotive systems, autonomous robotics, unmanned aerial vehicles, and cyber-physical infrastructures has created a fundamental tension between computational capability and stringent dependability requirements. Modern applications demand high throughput, low latency, and adaptive intelligence, yet must simultaneously satisfy functional safety, reliability, and security constraints under harsh operational and environmental conditions. This article presents an in-depth, theoretically grounded examination of fault tolerance strategies spanning hardware, software, and cross-layer architectural levels, with a particular focus on lockstep execution, modular redundancy, adaptive scheduling, and safety–security co-design. Drawing strictly from established literature, the paper synthesizes research on triple core lockstep processors, approximate redundancy, electromagnetic disturbance resilience, real-time interference-aware scheduling, and reliability challenges in advanced semiconductor nodes. The study adopts a qualitative, integrative methodology that analyzes architectural patterns, processor-level mechanisms, and system-level design principles across automotive zonal controllers, FPGA and ASIC implementations, and cloud-supported cyber-physical systems. Results are presented through descriptive analysis, highlighting how different fault tolerance mechanisms interact, complement, or constrain one another when deployed in real-world safety-critical contexts. The discussion critically interprets these findings by exploring trade-offs among performance, cost, scalability, and certification, while also addressing limitations inherent in current approaches. The article concludes by outlining future research directions toward adaptive, self-aware, and co-designed fault-tolerant systems capable of sustaining reliability as computational complexity and environmental uncertainty continue to grow.

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