Title: “Murphy Was Here”
Abstract: This presentation explores the factors that lead to avionics designers underestimating the possibility/probabilities of certain failures. Examples of hard to believe, but actually occurring, failures are given. These include Byzantine faults, component transmogrification, “evaporating” software and exhaustively tested software that still failed. My boss once said that “all system failures are caused by design faults.” This is because, regardless of the requirements, critical systems should be designed to never fail. It is almost never the case that a critical system fails in a way that was anticipated by the designers (e.g., redundancy exhaustion). After studying many aviation accidents, NASA’s C. Michael Holloway observed: “To a first approximation, we can say that accidents are almost always the result of incorrect estimates of the likelihood of one or more things.”
Bio: Driscoll is a Fellow in Honeywell’s research labs with over 40 years experience in safety and security critical systems. He was the chief avionics architect for NASA’s Orion CEV and co-architect for the Boeing 777 cockpit. He was a principal designer of the SAE AS4710 PI-bus and the ARINC 659 SAFEbus, the only two backplane bus standards with significant fault tolerance. He helped design the bus that became the IEEE 1149 JTAG test bus. He led the effort to create the FAA “Handbook for Data Network Evaluation Criteria.” He also contributed to the digital architecture of the U.S. National Aerospace Plane (NASP), Space Defense Initiative (SDI), Advanced Launch System and Honeywell’s vetronics programs and unmanned underwater vehicles. Prior to joining Honeywell, he worked in the areas of voice and data cryptography for the U.S. Army Security Agency and has developed cryptography specifically for real-time systems. Driscoll has 50 patents issued or pending covering safety and security critical real-time systems. He is a member of the IEEE/IFIP WG 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance. He was the U of MN CSci Distinguished Alumnus for 2011-2012.