An overview of an existing hierarchical reconfiguration scheme for a fault-tolerant two-dimensional cellular architecture is presented, wherein an array of finite state machine cells controls the processing and switching elements. This allows the array to either reconfigure in the presence of faults, or to perform different processing functions. Since the control mechanism is distributed, the system is not subject to single-point "hard core" failures, as in the case of a global control mechanism. Unlike other fault-tolerant systems, the proposed method does not assume the existence of components which never fail. The processing elements in the array are logically connected in a mesh pattern, and are provided with additional physical connections to other cells. A local reconfiguration scheme allows faulty cells to be bypassed via these additional connections, so that the logical mesh can be restored. This technique allows the array to quickly reconfigure in the presence of up to triple faults. When local reconfiguration fails, the array can still reconfigure by using a global reconfiguration scheme, in which the functional part of the array relocates itself to a faultfree area. The process is "global" in the sense that the entire functional part of the array is involved in the process, but the mechanism to accomplish this is still distributed in nature. With the framework of the system established, the results of this research are presented. The hardware complexities of the existing global reconfiguration scheme are analyzed, and compared with the complexities of previous work in this area. A distributed diagnosis algorithm is also developed, which works in conjunction with the local reconfiguration mechanism to quickly detect and isolate faults in the array. Using these results, the foundations are laid for a totally self-checking implementation of the control cells, which allows online concurrent fault detection in the array. / Master of Science

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published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Master / Master of Science in Real Estate and Construction

published_or_final_version / abstract / Urban Planning and Environmental Management / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Mechanical Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

Fault Recovery in process control requires effective fault detection, diagnosis and recovery schemes, and a fault-tolPi-ant system design. Fault detection and diagnosis involves creating a realistic model of the process, and using this model to analyse for fault conditions. The fault detection principles include feature extraction and pattern recognition, and analogue value limits and rate cf change limits. Fault recovery scheme? cover the realisation of redundancy ana back-up sub-systems, and state restoration techniques in the form of complete shutdowns, backward and forward recovery to a safe operating state. System design concepts include for the development of process control systems towards *hierarchical, level based distribution of functions. The level-based discussion is used as the basis for effective fault tolerant system design. Two case studies are included to show how fault recovery schemes were effected in a single process computer and in a distributed control system. Abstract

This dissertation was conducted as part of the efforts related to WPI's Precision Personnel Location (PPL) project, the purpose of which is to locate emergency personnel in hazardous indoor environments using radio location techniques. The current PPL system prototype uses a radio transmitter worn by the personnel, indoors, and receivers on reference units, outdoors. This dissertation proposes a new system architecture with bidirectional radio transmissions to replace the current unidirectional system architecture. This allows the development of a synchronization scheme that can extract additional Time of Arrival (TOA) information for estimating the location of personnel. This dissertation also describes an extension of the multi-signal fusion technique previously used that incorporates this TOA information. At the cost of a more complicated mobile unit design, resultant benefits of this approach include rejection of signal reflectors as solutions, improved accuracy with limited reference unit geometries, improved noise rejection and significant computation reduction. In this dissertation the mathematical underpinnings of this approach are presented, a performance analysis is developed and the results are evaluated in the context of experimental data.

This thesis was conducted as part of the efforts related to WPI's Precision Personnel Location (PPL) project, the purpose of which is to locate emergency personnel in hazardous indoor environments using radio location techniques. A unique signal processing algorithm, sART, developed within the PPL project provides means to determine precise position estimates of a wideband transmitter from multipath corrupted signals captured by distributed receivers. This algorithm has synchronization requirements that can not be met without extraordinary expense and complexity by direct means. This thesis develops digital signal processing that achieves the necessary synchronization to satisfy the sART algorithm requirements without additional implementation complexity. The mathematical underpinnings of this solution are introduced and the results are evaluated in the context of experimental data.