Archive for May, 2015

Boeing Dreamliner ‘Bug’

Friday, May 1st, 2015 Nigel Jones

There’s an all too familiar story in the press today. The headline at the Guardian reads “US aviation authority: Boeing 787 bug could cause ‘loss of control’. As usual with these kinds of stories, it’s light on technical details other than to reveal that the Dreamliner’s generators will fall into a fail safe mode if kept continuously powered for 248 days. In this fail-safe mode, the generator doesn’t apparently generate power. Thus if all four of the planes generators were powered on at the same time and kept powered for 248 days, then suddenly – no power. That’s what I’d call an unfortunate state of affairs if you were at 40,000 feet over the Atlantic.

So what’s special about 248 days? Well 248 days = 248 * 24 * 3600 = 21427200 seconds. Hmm that number looks familiar. Sure Enough, 2^31 / 100 ~= 21427200. From this I can deduce the following.

Boeing’s generators likely contain a signed 32 bit timer tick counter that is being incremented every 10ms (or possibly an unsigned 32 bit counter being incremented every 5ms – but that would be unusual). On the 248th day after start up, this counter overflows. What happens next is unclear, but Boeing must have some sort of error detection in place to detect that something bad has happened – and thus takes what on the face of it is a reasonable action and shuts down the generator.

However, what has really happened here is that Boeing has fallen into the trap of assuming that redundancy (i.e. four generators) leads to increased reliability. In this line of thinking, if the probability of a system failing is q, then the probability of all four systems failing is q*q*q*q – a number that is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the probability of just one system failing. For example if q is 0.001, then q^4 is 1,000,000,000 times smaller. At this point, the probability of a complete system failure is essentially zero. However, this is only the case if the systems are statistically independent. If they are not, then you can have as many redundant systems as you like, and the probability of failure will be stuck at q. Or to put it another way, you may as well eschew having any redundancy at all.

Now in the days of purely electro-mechanical systems, you could be excused for arguing that there’s a reasonable amount of statistical independence between redundant systems. However, once computer control comes into the mix, the degree of statistical dependence skyrockets (if you’d pardon the pun). By having four generators presumably running the same software, then Boeing made itself  completely vulnerable to this kind of failure.

Anyway, I gave a talk on this very topic on life support systems at a conference a few years ago – so if you have half an hour to waste have a watch. If you’d rather read something that’s a bit more coherent than the presentation, then the proceedings are available here. My paper starts at page 193.

The bottom line is this. If you are trying to design highly reliable systems and redundancy is an important part of your safety case, then you’d damn well better give a lot of thought to common mode failures of the software system. In this case, Boeing clearly had not, resulting in a supposedly fail-proof system that actually has a trivially simple catastrophic failure mode.