Patent ID: 8375243

Claim:
A vehicle failure determination system comprising: modular processors linked over a network for operating different vehicle applications that control or monitor associated critical and non-critical vehicle operations; critical data associated with critical operations, wherein the critical data associated with at least one critical operation is related to at least one of sensor data, brake data, speed data, engine data and GPS data; an executive configured to operate in at least one of the processors, wherein the executive is configured to: identify and save into memory the critical data, wherein the critical data identified and stored into memory is saved in a lock-step mode to determine how each process thread was executed in the linked modular processors, and wherein the lock-step mode is determined by at least one of a system clock, a system watchdog timer, a message manager, a critical data manager, a security manager, and a data manager; operate a task manager to determine at least one of a potential system failure or system failure that has occurred in at least one critical operation and how each process thread saved into the memory in the lock-step mode identifies the failure.