fehlerresistente

Fehlerresistente is a German term used in engineering to denote fault-tolerant or robust systems. It refers to systems, components, or designs that continue to function adequately when faults or errors occur. The concept emphasizes maintaining essential functions, preventing data loss, and avoiding unsafe states, rather than preventing all faults completely. It is commonly used in safety-critical and high-availability contexts.

Strategies include redundancy (duplicated hardware or software paths), diversity (different implementations to reduce common-mode failures), and error detection and correction (parity, checksums, ECC memory). Graceful degradation ensures the system remains usable even when some parts fail. Time redundancy (retries) and recovery mechanisms such as checkpointing, rollback, and transactional integrity are also employed. In distributed systems, consensus and voting (quorum, majority) can provide fault tolerance against node failures or Byzantine faults.

Common examples are RAID storage with mirroring, ECC memory, hot-swappable power supplies, and N-version programming in avionics. In software, fault-tolerant design includes exception handling, idempotent operations, and retry logic. Safety standards in German-speaking regions often link Fehlerresistenz with reliability, availability, and safety requirements in sectors such as aerospace, automotive, and medical devices (e.g., ISO 26262).

Limitations include higher cost, greater complexity, potential coordination failures, and diminishing returns under extreme fault rates. Effective fault tolerance requires careful risk assessment (e.g., FMEA), appropriate redundancy levels, and avoidance of common-mode failures through design diversity and robust testing.