The High Redundancy Actuator (HRA) project investigates a novel approach to fault tolerant actuation, which uses a high number of small actuation elements, assembled in series and parallel in order to form a single intrinsically fault tolerant actuator. Element faults affect the maximum capability of the overall actuator, but through control techniques, the required performance can be maintained. This allows higher levels of reliability to be attained in exchange for less over-dimensioning in comparison to conventional redundancy techniques. In addition, the combination of both serial and parallel elements provides intrinsic accommodation of both lock-up and loose faults. Research to date has concentrated on HRAs based on electromechanical technology, of relatively low order, controlled through passive Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) methods. The objective of this thesis is to expand upon this work. HRA configurations of higher order, formed from electromagnetic actuators are considered. An element model for a moving coil actuator is derived from first principles and verified experimentally. This element model is then used to form high-order, non-linear HRA models for simulation, and reduced-order representations for control design. A simple, passive FTC law is designed for the HRA configurations, the results of which are compared to a decentralised, active FTC approach applied through a framework based upon multi-agent concepts. The results indicate that limited fault tolerance can be achieved through simple passive control, however, performance degradation occurs, and requirements are not met under theoretically tolerable fault levels. Active FTC offers substantial performance improvements, meeting the requirements of the system under the vast majority of theoretically tolerable fault scenarios. However, these improvements are made at the cost of increased system complexity and a reliance on fault detection. Fault Detection (FD) and health monitoring of the HRA is explored. A simple rule-based FD method, for use within the active FTC, is described and simulated. An interacting multiple model FD method is also examined, which is more suitable for health monitoring in a centralised control scheme. Both of these methods provide the required level of fault information for their respective purposes. However, they achieve this through the introduction of complexity. The rule-based method increases system complexity, requiring high levels of instrumentation, and conversely the interacting multiple model approach involves complexity of design and computation. Finally, the development of a software demonstrator is described. Experimental rigs at the current project phase are restricted to relatively low numbers of elements for practical reasons such as cost, space and technological limitations. Hence, a software demonstrator has been developed in Matlab/Simulink which provides a visual representation of HRAs with larger numbers of elements, and varied configuration for further demonstration of this concept.

Research into modular approaches for constructing power electronics control systems has provided a number of benefits, as well as new opportunities. Control systems composed of an interconnected collection of standardized parts makes distributed processing a realistic possibility. Unfortunately, current strategies to supporting software on such systems have a number of critical drawbacks. Many existing approaches rely on centralized control strategies, fail to support fault tolerance in the face of failures among processing nodes or communications links, and fail to robustly support live addition or removal of nodes from a running network. In this context, failure of a single element means failure of the entire system. This thesis describes research to extend the Dataflow Architecture Real-time Kernel (DARK) to support distributed, fault-tolerant execution of control algorithms for power electronics control systems. An appropriate scheme for fault-tolerant scheduling of processes on distributed processing nodes is described, added to DARK, and evaluated. Literature indicates that fault-tolerant multiprocessor scheduling for hard real-time tasks with task precedence constraints is an NP-hard problem. The new system is based on an off-line fault-tolerant scheduling strategy that generates a static schedule of tasks for each processing unit to follow. This algorithm handles both the task precedence constraints and the constraints imposed by the underlying network protocol(DRPESNET). Modifications to the underlying daisy-chained, packet-switched, time-triggered ring network protocol to support communications fault tolerance and plug-and-play addition or removal of live nodes from an existing control system are also described. / Master of Science

Les convertisseurs statiques triphasés AC/DC/AC à structure tension sont largement utilisés dans de nombreuses applications de puissance. La continuité de service de ces systèmes ainsi que leur sécurité, leur fiabilité et leurs performances sont aujourd'hui des préoccupations majeures de ce domaine lié à l'énergie. En effet, la défaillance du convertisseur peut conduire à la perte totale ou partielle du contrôle des courants de phase et peut donc provoquer de graves dysfonctionnements du système, voire son arrêt complet. Afin d'empêcher la propagation du défaut aux autres composants du système et assurer la continuité de service en toute circonstance lors d'une défaillance du convertisseur, des topologies de convertisseur "fault tolerant" associées à des méthodes efficaces et rapides de détection et de compensation de défaut doivent être mises en oeuvre. Dans ce mémoire, nous étudions la continuité de service de trois topologies de convertisseurs AC/DC/AC avec ou sans redondance, lors de la défaillance d'un de leurs interrupteurs. Deux applications sont ciblées : l'alimentation d'une charge RL triphasée et un système éolien de conversion de l'énergie basé sur une MADA. Un composant FPGA est utilisé pour la détection du défaut, afin de réduire autant que possible son temps de détection. Des variantes permettant d'optimiser la méthode de détection de défaut sont également proposées et évaluées. Les trois topologies de convertisseurs proposées, associées à leurs contrôleurs, ont été validées de la modélisation/ simulation à la validation sur banc de test expérimental, en passant par le prototypage "FPGA in the Loop" du FPGA, destiné plus spécifiquement à la détection du défaut / AC/DC/AC converters are widely being used in a variety of power applications. Continuity of service of these systems as well as their reliability and performances are now of the major concerns. Indeed, the failure of the converter can lead to the total or partial loss of the control of the phase currents and can cause serious system malfunction or shutdown. Thus, uncompensated faults can quickly endanger the system. Therefore, to prevent the spread of the fault to the other system components and to ensure continuity of service, fault tolerant converter topologies associated to quick and effective fault detection and compensation methods must be implemented. In this thesis, we present the continuity of service of three AC/DC/AC fault tolerant converters with or without redundancy, in the presence of a fault in one of their switches. Two types of applications are studied: the supply off a three-phase charge and a wind energy conversion system based on a DFIG. An FPGA based implementation is used for fault detection, in order to reduce the detection time as much as possible. Three optimizations in the fault detection method are also presented. During these researches, the three proposed converter topologies and their controllers are validated in simulations and also experimentally, while being validated in a "FPGA in the Loop" prototyping

Esta dissertação aborda um ramo da computação que se encontra em crescente desenvolvimento: a computação em tempo real. Os sistemas de computação tempo real surgiram a partir da necessidade de substituição do controle humano, que muitas vezes é falho, em situações complexas ou críticas, onde máxima confiabilidade e disponibilidade são exigidas para garantir a segurança do sistema. A área de aplicação diferencia-se de outras convencionais por possuir diferentes tipos de restrições de tempo e operar em ambientes não-determinísticos. Entretanto, atualmente tais sistemas estão tornando-se grandes, complexos, distribuídos, adaptativos e cada vez mais presentes nas aplicações do dia-a-dia,o que tende a exigir soluções mais simples e generalizadas. Pelo fato de tais sistemas normalmente atuarem sobre aplicações críticas, importante salientar que, em algumas situações, pequenos erros no sistema podem levar a grandes catástrofes. Mesmo atrasos mínimos no tempo de resposta são problemáticos, podendo ocasionar degradações ou ações erradas no mundo físico controlado pelo sistema tempo real. Como nestes casos máxima confiabilidade e disponibilidade são exigidas para garantir a sua segurança, tornou-se importante a construção de sistemas tempo real tolerantes a falhas. Dessa forma, é visivelmente crescente a necessidade de utilização de mecanismos capazes de abordar os requisitos de tempo real e tolerância a falhas de forma integrada durante o desenvolvimento do sistema. Assim, o processo de desenvolvimento de sistemas tempo real confiáveis torna-se mais simples e mais eficiente. A necessidade de maior conhecimento do uso de tolerância a falhas para obter segurança no funcionamento de aplicações tempo real levou ao desenvolvimento deste trabalho, onde buscou-se um caminho de solução para a adequação das técnicas de tolerância a falhas a estas aplicações. Sabe-se que para produzir software confiável e, desta forma de maior qualidade, além do emprego de boas técnicas de engenharia de software, é necessário compreender os principais conceitos e técnicas de tolerância a falhas. Por outro lado, é importante ter-se conhecimento dos mecanismos oferecidos pelas diversas camadas de software de um sistema - protocolo de comunicação, sistema operacional e linguagem de programação - para apoiar estas atividades de tolerância a falhas. Este trabalho busca analisar os mecanismos e técnicas usados na implementação de software tolerante a falhas frente às situações mencionadas, uma vez que nem todas as técnicas conhecidas podem ser indistintamente aplicáveis a estas situações. Os resultados desta análise são organizados na forma de uma taxonomia, visando assim auxiliar projetistas de desenvolvimento de software a tomarem decisões importantes na construção de sistemas tempo real tolerantes a falhas. Os mecanismos são agrupados de acordo com o nível de implementação: sistemas operacionais, linguagens de programação e protocolos de comunicação, destacando suas características e aplicabilidade. Por fim uso da classificação é demonstrado com a análise de três casos-exemplo. / This dissertation is about a, computer science field which is in growing development, that is, real-time computation. Real-time computing systems have emerged from the necessity of substituting. human control which is sometimes failed in complex or critical situations. In these ones maximum availability and reliability are requested in order to guarantee the system dependability. The application area differs from the conventional ones because it has particular time constraints and operates in nondeterministic environments. Nevertheless, nowadays such systems are becoming large, complex, distributed and adaptive but tend to demand simpler and generalized solutions as they are more present in daily applications. Since such systems normally act on critical applications it is important to reinforce, that in some situations, subtle systems errors may generate big catastrophes. Even slight delays in response time are troublesome and they may cause degradation or wrong acts in physical world controlled by real-time systems. In these cases maximum reliability and availability are requested in order to guarantee system dependability. Thereby, the requirement of including mechanisms capable of achieving real-time and fault tolerance in an integrated way during the system design has been increased. Thus, the developing process of reliable real-time systems becomes simpler and more effective. The necessity of improving designers knowledge on using fault tolerance in order to obtain dependability on real-time applications has motivated this study. Our main goal has been to find an adequate way of using fault tolerance techniques to these applications. It is known that the development of reliable software not only requires appropriate software engineering techniques but also demands understanding of main politics and mechanisms used to implement fault tolerance techniques in these situations. Otherwise, it is very important to know the related support that is offered by the different software levels of a system - communication protocol, operating system and programming language. This study has as purpose analyzing the mechanisms and techniques used in implementation of fault-tolerant software applied to the previously mentioned situations. The basic supposition is that not all the known techniques may be applied indistinctly to these situations. The properties of the software are organized according to a taxonomy, where the mechanisms are bracketed in groups according to implementation level: operating systems, programming languages and communication protocols. In this presentation, the characteristics and applicability of the software tools are stood out in order to help developing-software designers to decide what is important to build faulttolerant software. Finally, the use of the classification is demonstrated by analyzing three case-examples.

Esta dissertação aborda um ramo da computação que se encontra em crescente desenvolvimento: a computação em tempo real. Os sistemas de computação tempo real surgiram a partir da necessidade de substituição do controle humano, que muitas vezes é falho, em situações complexas ou críticas, onde máxima confiabilidade e disponibilidade são exigidas para garantir a segurança do sistema. A área de aplicação diferencia-se de outras convencionais por possuir diferentes tipos de restrições de tempo e operar em ambientes não-determinísticos. Entretanto, atualmente tais sistemas estão tornando-se grandes, complexos, distribuídos, adaptativos e cada vez mais presentes nas aplicações do dia-a-dia,o que tende a exigir soluções mais simples e generalizadas. Pelo fato de tais sistemas normalmente atuarem sobre aplicações críticas, importante salientar que, em algumas situações, pequenos erros no sistema podem levar a grandes catástrofes. Mesmo atrasos mínimos no tempo de resposta são problemáticos, podendo ocasionar degradações ou ações erradas no mundo físico controlado pelo sistema tempo real. Como nestes casos máxima confiabilidade e disponibilidade são exigidas para garantir a sua segurança, tornou-se importante a construção de sistemas tempo real tolerantes a falhas. Dessa forma, é visivelmente crescente a necessidade de utilização de mecanismos capazes de abordar os requisitos de tempo real e tolerância a falhas de forma integrada durante o desenvolvimento do sistema. Assim, o processo de desenvolvimento de sistemas tempo real confiáveis torna-se mais simples e mais eficiente. A necessidade de maior conhecimento do uso de tolerância a falhas para obter segurança no funcionamento de aplicações tempo real levou ao desenvolvimento deste trabalho, onde buscou-se um caminho de solução para a adequação das técnicas de tolerância a falhas a estas aplicações. Sabe-se que para produzir software confiável e, desta forma de maior qualidade, além do emprego de boas técnicas de engenharia de software, é necessário compreender os principais conceitos e técnicas de tolerância a falhas. Por outro lado, é importante ter-se conhecimento dos mecanismos oferecidos pelas diversas camadas de software de um sistema - protocolo de comunicação, sistema operacional e linguagem de programação - para apoiar estas atividades de tolerância a falhas. Este trabalho busca analisar os mecanismos e técnicas usados na implementação de software tolerante a falhas frente às situações mencionadas, uma vez que nem todas as técnicas conhecidas podem ser indistintamente aplicáveis a estas situações. Os resultados desta análise são organizados na forma de uma taxonomia, visando assim auxiliar projetistas de desenvolvimento de software a tomarem decisões importantes na construção de sistemas tempo real tolerantes a falhas. Os mecanismos são agrupados de acordo com o nível de implementação: sistemas operacionais, linguagens de programação e protocolos de comunicação, destacando suas características e aplicabilidade. Por fim uso da classificação é demonstrado com a análise de três casos-exemplo. / This dissertation is about a, computer science field which is in growing development, that is, real-time computation. Real-time computing systems have emerged from the necessity of substituting. human control which is sometimes failed in complex or critical situations. In these ones maximum availability and reliability are requested in order to guarantee the system dependability. The application area differs from the conventional ones because it has particular time constraints and operates in nondeterministic environments. Nevertheless, nowadays such systems are becoming large, complex, distributed and adaptive but tend to demand simpler and generalized solutions as they are more present in daily applications. Since such systems normally act on critical applications it is important to reinforce, that in some situations, subtle systems errors may generate big catastrophes. Even slight delays in response time are troublesome and they may cause degradation or wrong acts in physical world controlled by real-time systems. In these cases maximum reliability and availability are requested in order to guarantee system dependability. Thereby, the requirement of including mechanisms capable of achieving real-time and fault tolerance in an integrated way during the system design has been increased. Thus, the developing process of reliable real-time systems becomes simpler and more effective. The necessity of improving designers knowledge on using fault tolerance in order to obtain dependability on real-time applications has motivated this study. Our main goal has been to find an adequate way of using fault tolerance techniques to these applications. It is known that the development of reliable software not only requires appropriate software engineering techniques but also demands understanding of main politics and mechanisms used to implement fault tolerance techniques in these situations. Otherwise, it is very important to know the related support that is offered by the different software levels of a system - communication protocol, operating system and programming language. This study has as purpose analyzing the mechanisms and techniques used in implementation of fault-tolerant software applied to the previously mentioned situations. The basic supposition is that not all the known techniques may be applied indistinctly to these situations. The properties of the software are organized according to a taxonomy, where the mechanisms are bracketed in groups according to implementation level: operating systems, programming languages and communication protocols. In this presentation, the characteristics and applicability of the software tools are stood out in order to help developing-software designers to decide what is important to build faulttolerant software. Finally, the use of the classification is demonstrated by analyzing three case-examples.

Esta dissertação aborda um ramo da computação que se encontra em crescente desenvolvimento: a computação em tempo real. Os sistemas de computação tempo real surgiram a partir da necessidade de substituição do controle humano, que muitas vezes é falho, em situações complexas ou críticas, onde máxima confiabilidade e disponibilidade são exigidas para garantir a segurança do sistema. A área de aplicação diferencia-se de outras convencionais por possuir diferentes tipos de restrições de tempo e operar em ambientes não-determinísticos. Entretanto, atualmente tais sistemas estão tornando-se grandes, complexos, distribuídos, adaptativos e cada vez mais presentes nas aplicações do dia-a-dia,o que tende a exigir soluções mais simples e generalizadas. Pelo fato de tais sistemas normalmente atuarem sobre aplicações críticas, importante salientar que, em algumas situações, pequenos erros no sistema podem levar a grandes catástrofes. Mesmo atrasos mínimos no tempo de resposta são problemáticos, podendo ocasionar degradações ou ações erradas no mundo físico controlado pelo sistema tempo real. Como nestes casos máxima confiabilidade e disponibilidade são exigidas para garantir a sua segurança, tornou-se importante a construção de sistemas tempo real tolerantes a falhas. Dessa forma, é visivelmente crescente a necessidade de utilização de mecanismos capazes de abordar os requisitos de tempo real e tolerância a falhas de forma integrada durante o desenvolvimento do sistema. Assim, o processo de desenvolvimento de sistemas tempo real confiáveis torna-se mais simples e mais eficiente. A necessidade de maior conhecimento do uso de tolerância a falhas para obter segurança no funcionamento de aplicações tempo real levou ao desenvolvimento deste trabalho, onde buscou-se um caminho de solução para a adequação das técnicas de tolerância a falhas a estas aplicações. Sabe-se que para produzir software confiável e, desta forma de maior qualidade, além do emprego de boas técnicas de engenharia de software, é necessário compreender os principais conceitos e técnicas de tolerância a falhas. Por outro lado, é importante ter-se conhecimento dos mecanismos oferecidos pelas diversas camadas de software de um sistema - protocolo de comunicação, sistema operacional e linguagem de programação - para apoiar estas atividades de tolerância a falhas. Este trabalho busca analisar os mecanismos e técnicas usados na implementação de software tolerante a falhas frente às situações mencionadas, uma vez que nem todas as técnicas conhecidas podem ser indistintamente aplicáveis a estas situações. Os resultados desta análise são organizados na forma de uma taxonomia, visando assim auxiliar projetistas de desenvolvimento de software a tomarem decisões importantes na construção de sistemas tempo real tolerantes a falhas. Os mecanismos são agrupados de acordo com o nível de implementação: sistemas operacionais, linguagens de programação e protocolos de comunicação, destacando suas características e aplicabilidade. Por fim uso da classificação é demonstrado com a análise de três casos-exemplo. / This dissertation is about a, computer science field which is in growing development, that is, real-time computation. Real-time computing systems have emerged from the necessity of substituting. human control which is sometimes failed in complex or critical situations. In these ones maximum availability and reliability are requested in order to guarantee the system dependability. The application area differs from the conventional ones because it has particular time constraints and operates in nondeterministic environments. Nevertheless, nowadays such systems are becoming large, complex, distributed and adaptive but tend to demand simpler and generalized solutions as they are more present in daily applications. Since such systems normally act on critical applications it is important to reinforce, that in some situations, subtle systems errors may generate big catastrophes. Even slight delays in response time are troublesome and they may cause degradation or wrong acts in physical world controlled by real-time systems. In these cases maximum reliability and availability are requested in order to guarantee system dependability. Thereby, the requirement of including mechanisms capable of achieving real-time and fault tolerance in an integrated way during the system design has been increased. Thus, the developing process of reliable real-time systems becomes simpler and more effective. The necessity of improving designers knowledge on using fault tolerance in order to obtain dependability on real-time applications has motivated this study. Our main goal has been to find an adequate way of using fault tolerance techniques to these applications. It is known that the development of reliable software not only requires appropriate software engineering techniques but also demands understanding of main politics and mechanisms used to implement fault tolerance techniques in these situations. Otherwise, it is very important to know the related support that is offered by the different software levels of a system - communication protocol, operating system and programming language. This study has as purpose analyzing the mechanisms and techniques used in implementation of fault-tolerant software applied to the previously mentioned situations. The basic supposition is that not all the known techniques may be applied indistinctly to these situations. The properties of the software are organized according to a taxonomy, where the mechanisms are bracketed in groups according to implementation level: operating systems, programming languages and communication protocols. In this presentation, the characteristics and applicability of the software tools are stood out in order to help developing-software designers to decide what is important to build faulttolerant software. Finally, the use of the classification is demonstrated by analyzing three case-examples.

As intelligent hydraulic systems with embedded sensors become more ubiquitous, the real or perceived reliability challenge associated with sensors must be addressed to encourage their adoption. In this paper, a fault-tolerant control strategy for an intelligent independent metering valve that allows continued operation if a sensor fails is described. The twin-spool valve example utilizes position sensors to stabilize the spool positions and eliminate hysteresis, and pressure sensors to provide digital pressure compensation, electronic load sensing, and other features. An independent metering valve has redundancy provided by four sensors working together to control the flow into and out of a single actuator. Although two sensors are needed to control the flow through a spool, the controller can be reconfigured to ensure the flow is always controlled on the spool with both sensors working. To accomplish this, the concept of cross-port pressure control is introduced that uses the faulty side of the valve to maintain constant pressure on the non-faulty side. By maintaining a constant pressure, the flow in and out of the actuator are balanced. Experimental results on the boom of a backhoe demonstrate the operation of the fault tolerant control strategy.

In order to provide improved service quality to applications, networks need to address the need for reliability of data delivery. Reliability can be improved by incorporating fault tolerance into network routing, wherein a set of multiple routes are used for routing between a given source and destination. This thesis proposes a new fault-tolerant protocol, called the Multipath Fault Tolerant Protocol for Routing (MFTPR), to improve the reliability of network routing services. The protocol is based on a multipath discovery algorithm, the Quasi-Shortest Multipath (QSMP), and is designed to work in conjunction with the routing protocol employed by the network. MFTPR improves upon the QSMP algorithm by finding more routes than QSMP, and also provides for maintenance of these routes in the event of failure of network components. In order to evaluate the resilience of a pair of paths to failure, this thesis proposes metrics that evaluate the non-disjointness of a pair of paths and measure the probability of simultaneous failure of these paths. The performance of MFTPR to find alternate routes based on these metrics is analyzed through simulation.

Les services Web tolérants aux fautes sont des composants avec une grande résilience aux défaillances qui résultent de différentes fautes imprévues, par exemple des bugs logiciels ou crash de machine. Comme il est impossible de prévoir l'apparition d'éventuelles fautes, de nombreuses stratégies consistent à dupliquer, d'une manière passive ou active, les composants critiques (eg. services Web) qui interagissent durant une exécution d'application distribuée (eg. composition). La capacité d'une application à continuer l exécution en présence de défaillances de composants référé a la Tolérance aux Fautes (TF). La duplication est la solution largement utilisée pour rendre les composants tolérants aux fautes. La TF peut être assurée à travers la réplication ou la diversité. Nous nous intéressons particulièrement dans cette thèse à la diversité, et nous montrons comment un ensemble de services Web sémantiquement équivalents qui fournissent la même fonctionnalité (eg. prévisions météo), mais qui l'implémentent différemment, collaborent pour rendre un service Web TF. Nous illustrons les limites de la réplication (présence de fautes répliquées), et proposons la diversité comme une solution alternative. En effet, la littérature a révélé un intérêt limité dans l'utilisation de la diversité pour rendre les services Web tolérants aux fautes / Fault Tolerant Web services are components with higher resilience to failures that result out of various unexpected faults for instance software bugs and machine crashes. Since it is impractical to predict the potential occurrence of a fault, a widely used strategy consists of duplicating, in a passive or active way, critical components (e.g., Web services) that interact during a distributed application execution (e.g., composition). The ability of this application to continue operation despite component failures is referred to as Fault Tolerance (FT). Duplication is usually put forward as a solution to make these components fault tolerant. It is achieved through either replication or diversity. In this thesis, we are particularly interested in diversity, and we show how semantically similar Web services, i.e., offer same functionality (e.g., Weather Forecast) but implement this functionality differently in terms of business logic and technical resources, collaborate together to make web services fault tolerant. We illustrate the limitations of replication (e.g., presence of replicated faults) and suggests diversity as an alternative solution. Our literature review revealed a limited interest in diversity for FT Web services

Non traduit / Semiconductor is one of the most reliable inventions when engineered and used with longevity in mind. However, the increasing demand of fast and highly featured products has drastically changed the reliability realm in the recent years. The means of improving the reliability of nano-metric technology circuits encompass techniques that tackle reliability issues at the level of technology, design and manufacturing. Absolutely necessary but these techniques are almost inevitably imperfect. Therefore, it becomes essential to reduce the consequence of the "remaining" faults using fault tolerance techniques.This thesis focuses on improving and developing new low-power fault tolerance techniques that combine the attractive features of different types of redundancies to tackle permanent and transient faults and addresses the problem of error detection and confinement in modern microprocessor cores. Our case study implementation results show that a power saving of up to 20% can be achieved in comparison with fault tolerance techniques that use only one type of redundancy, and offer low-power lifetime reliability improvement.With the objective to further improve the efficiency in terms of cost and fault tolerance capability we present a design space exploration and an efficient cost-reliability trade-off analysis methodology to selectively harden logic circuits using hybrid fault tolerant techniques. The outcome of the two studies establish that hybrid fault tolerant approaches provide a good foundation for building low-power reliable circuits and systems from future technologies, and our experimental results set a good starting point for further innovative research in this area.