Design and Implementation of a Reconfigurable Corrective Control System Subject to Permanent Faults in the Controller

Area of Science:

• Control Engineering
• Computer Engineering
• Fault-Tolerant Systems

Background:

• Asynchronous sequential machines (ASMs) are crucial in digital systems.
• Corrective controllers in ASMs can be vulnerable to permanent faults, leading to state degeneration.
• Existing fault tolerance methods often require significant hardware redundancy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a new reconfiguration strategy for corrective controllers in ASMs.
• To achieve model matching control despite controller state degeneration caused by faults.
• To reduce the overhead associated with fault tolerance in ASMs.

Main Methods:

• Developing a reconfiguration scheme that utilizes supplementary states to take over the functionality of degenerated states.
• Implementing model matching control for fault-tolerant ASMs.
• Validating the strategy through hardware experiments on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuits.

Main Results:

• The proposed reconfiguration scheme effectively manages degenerated states in ASM controllers.
• The strategy demonstrates superior fault tolerance compared to conventional methods.
• The number of required redundant states is significantly reduced.

Conclusions:

• The presented research is the first to report on reconfigurable corrective controllers for ASMs.
• The strategy offers an efficient and effective approach to fault tolerance in ASM-based systems.
• Hardware validation confirms the practical applicability of the proposed scheme.