Distributed Fault-Tolerant Consensus Tracking Control of Multi-Agent Systems under Fixed and Switching Topologies

This paper proposes a novel distributed fault-tolerant consensus tracking control design for multi-agent systems with abrupt and incipient actuator faults under fixed and switching topologies. The fault and state information of each individual agent is estimated by merging unknown input observer in the decentralized fault estimation hierarchy. Then, two kinds of distributed fault-tolerant consensus tracking control schemes with average dwelling time technique are developed to guarantee the mean-square exponential consensus convergence of multi-agent systems, respectively, on the basis of the relative neighboring output information as well as the estimated information in fault estimation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant consensus tracking control algorithm

Hierarchical-Structure-Based Fault Estimation and Fault-Tolerant Control for Multiagent Systems

This paper proposes a hierarchical-structure-based fault estimation and fault-tolerant control design with bidirectional interactions for nonlinear multiagent systems with actuator faults. The hierarchical structure consists of distributed multiagent system hierarchy, undirected topology hierarchy, decentralized fault estimation hierarchy, and distributed fault-tolerant control hierarchy. The states and faults of the system are estimated simultaneously by merging the unknown input observer in a decentralized fashion. The distributed-constant-gain-based and node-based fault-tolerant control schemes are developed to guarantee the asymptotic stability and H-infinity performance of multiagent systems, respectively, based on the estimated information in the fault estimation hierarchy and the relative output information from neighbors. Two simulation cases validate the efficiency of the proposed hierarchical structure control algorithm

New Fault Tolerant Multicast Routing Techniques to Enhance Distributed-Memory Systems Performance

Distributed-memory systems are a key to achieve high performance computing and the most favorable architectures used in advanced research problems. Mesh connected multicomputer are one of the most popular architectures that have been implemented in many distributed-memory systems. These systems must support communication operations efficiently to achieve good performance. The wormhole switching technique has been widely used in design of distributed-memory systems in which the packet is divided into small flits. Also, the multicast communication has been widely used in distributed-memory systems which is one source node sends the same message to several destination nodes. Fault tolerance refers to the ability of the system to operate correctly in the presence of faults. Development of fault tolerant multicast routing algorithms in 2D mesh networks is an important issue. This dissertation presents, new fault tolerant multicast routing algorithms for distributed-memory systems performance using wormhole routed 2D mesh. These algorithms are described for fault tolerant routing in 2D mesh networks, but it can also be extended to other topologies. These algorithms are a combination of a unicast-based multicast algorithm and tree-based multicast algorithms. These algorithms works effectively for the most commonly encountered faults in mesh networks, f-rings, f-chains and concave fault regions. It is shown that the proposed routing algorithms are effective even in the presence of a large number of fault regions and large size of fault region. These algorithms are proved to be deadlock-free. Also, the problem of fault regions overlap is solved. Four essential performance metrics in mesh networks will be considered and calculated; also these algorithms are a limited-global-information-based multicasting which is a compromise of local-information-based approach and global-information-based approach. Data mining is used to validate the results and to enlarge the sample. The proposed new multicast routing techniques are used to enhance the performance of distributed-memory systems. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms

Synthesis of fault-tolerant distributed systems

A distributed system is fault-tolerant if it continues to perform correctly even when a subset of the processes becomes faulty. Fault-tolerance is highly desirable but often difficult to implement. In this paper, we investigate fault-tolerant synthesis, i.e., the problem of determining whether a given temporal specification can be implemented as a fault-tolerant distributed system. As in standard distributed synthesis, we assume that the specification of the correct behaviors is given as a temporal formula over the externally visible variables. Additionally, we introduce the fault-tolerance specification, a CTL* formula describing the effects and the duration of faults. If, at some point in time, a process becomes faulty, it becomes part of the external environment and its further behavior is only restricted by the fault-tolerance specification. This allows us to model a large variety of fault types. Our method accounts for the effect of faults on the values communicated by the processes, and, hence, on the information available to the non-faulty processes. We prove that for fully connected system architectures, i.e., for systems where each pair of processes is connected by a communication link, the fault-tolerant synthesis problem from CTL* specifications is 2EXPTIME-complete

Distributed AdaptiveFault-Tolerant Control of Uncertain Multi-Agent Systems

This brief paper presents a distributed adaptive fault-tolerant leader-following consensus control scheme for a class of nonlinear uncertain multi-agent systems under a bidirectional communication topology with possibly asymmetric weights and subject to process and actuator faults. A local fault-tolerant control (FTC) component is designed for each agent using local measurements and suitable information exchanged between neighboring agents. Each local FTC component consists of a fault diagnosis module and a reconfigurable controller module comprised of a baseline controller and two adaptive fault-tolerant controllers activated after fault detection and after fault isolation, respectively. By using an appropriately chosen Lyapunov function, the closed-loop stability and asymptotic convergence property of leader–follower consensus are rigorously established under different operating modes of the FTC system

Distributed Fault Estimation and Fault-Tolerant Control of Interconnected Systems

This paper studies distributed fault estimation and fault-tolerant control for continuous-time interconnected systems. Using associated information among subsystems to design the distributed fault estimation observer can improve the accuracy of fault estimation of interconnected systems. Based on static output feedback, the global outputs of interconnected systems are used to construct a distributed fault-tolerant control. The multi-constrained methods are proposed to enhance the transient performance and ability to suppress external disturbances simultaneously. The conditions of the presented design techniques are expressed in terms of linear matrix inequalities. Simulation results are illustrated to show the feasibility of the presented approaches

Brief announcement: fault-tolerant broadcast service in anonymous distributed systems with fair lossy communication channels

Fault-tolerant broadcast is a fundamental service in distributed systems, by which processes can communicate with each other consistently and reliably. It has two main forms: Reliable Broadcast (RB) and Uniform Reliable Broadcast(URB). This service has been extensively investigated in non-anonymous distributed systems where processes have unique identi?ers, usually assume the communication chan- nels are reliable, which is not always the case in real systems. In this paper, the fault-tolerant broadcast service is studied in an anonymous asynchronous message passing distributed system model with fair lossy communication chan- nels. Firstly, two simple and non-quiescent algorithms implementing RB and URB are given. Secondly, two new classes of failure detectors A? and AP? are proposed. Finally, with the information provided by A? and AP?, quiescent algorithms for both RB and URB are given

Self-stabilizing sorting algorithms

A distributed system consists of a set of machines which do not share a global memory. Depending on the connectivity of the network, each machine gets a partial view of the global state. Transient failures in one area of the network may go unnoticed in other areas and may cause the system to go to an illegal global state. However, if the system were self-stabilizing, it would be guaranteed that regardless of the current state, the system would recover to a legal configuration in a finite number of moves; The traditional way of creating reliable systems is to make redundant components. Self-stabilization allows systems to be fault tolerant through software as well. This is an evolving paradigm in the design of robust distributed systems. The ability to recover spontaneously from an arbitrary state makes self-stabilizing systems immune to transient failures or perturbations in the system state such as changes in network topology; This thesis presents an O(nh) fault-tolerant distributed sorting algorithm for a tree network, where n is the number of nodes in the system, and h is the height of the tree. Fault-tolerance is achieved using Dijkstra\u27s paradigm of self-stabilization which is a method of non-masking fault-tolerance embedding the fault-tolerance within the algorithm. Varghese\u27s counter flushing method is used in order to achieve synchronization among processes in the system. In the distributed sorting problem each node is given a value and an id which are non-corruptible. The idea is to have each node take a specific value based on its id. The algorithm handles transient faults by weeding out false information in the system. Nodes can start with completely false information concerning the values and ids of the system yet the intended behavior is still achieved. Also, nodes are allowed to crash and re-enter the system later as well as allowing new nodes to enter the system

Formal fault-tolerance proofs for distributed algorithms

Distributed Algorithms express problems as concurrent failing processes which co- operate and interact towards a common goal. Such algorithms arise in a wide range of applications, including distributed information processing, banking systems and airline reservation systems amongst others. It is desirable that distributed algorithms are well be- haved both in a failure free environment and even in the presence of failure (i.e. fault tolerant). To ensure well behavedness for all executions of distributed algorithms formal correctness proofs are needed. This is due to the concurrent nature of such algorithms, where executions of the algorithms result in different interleavings amongst parallel pro- cesses (i.e. there is a large number of possible execution paths).peer-reviewe