A new bitwise voting strategy for safety-critical systems with binary decisions

The main issue in controlling safety-critical systems such as nuclear power reactors or railway interlocking systems is to provide high safety and reliability where the risk ratio is at the highest level because small errors might result in hazardous accidents (e.g., death or injury of many people). The N-version programming technique, where N-different modules run in parallel, can be used to improve the reliability and safety of such systems at the desired safety level. Decisions of N-different modules are then evaluated by another component, usually known as the voter, using different voting strategies. In the current study a bitwise voting strategy to evaluate module decisions that are based on safe-states of variables is proposed and possible synchronization problems between the modules are determined. Sequence diagrams and solutions for synchronization problems are also explained.