Real-time and fault tolerance in distributed control software

Closed loop control systems typically contain multitude of spatially distributed sensors and actuators operated simultaneously. So those systems are parallel and distributed in their essence. But mapping this parallelism onto the given distributed hardware architecture, brings in some additional requirements: safe multithreading, optimal process allocation, real-time scheduling of bus and network resources. Nowadays, fault tolerance methods and fast even online reconfiguration are becoming increasingly important. All those often conflicting requirements, make design and implementation of real-time distributed control systems an extremely difficult task, that requires substantial knowledge in several areas of control and computer science. Although many design methods have been proposed so far, none of them had succeeded to cover all important aspects of the problem at hand. [1] Continuous increase of production in embedded market, makes a simple and natural design methodology for real-time systems needed more then ever

Analysis of RSVP-TE graceful restart

GMPLS is viewed as an attractive intelligent control plane for different network technologies and graceful restart is a key technique in ensuring this control plane is resilient and able to recover adequately from faults. This paper analyses the graceful restart mechanism proposed for a key GMPLS protocol, RSVP-TE. A novel analytical model, which may be readily adapted to study other protocols, is developed. This model allows the efficacy of graceful restart to be evaluated in a number of scenarios. It is found that, unsurprisingly, increasing control message loss and increasing the number of data plane connections both increased the time to complete recovery. It was also discovered that a threshold exists beyond which a relatively small change in the control message loss probability causes a disproportionately large increase in the time to complete recovery. The interesting findings in this work suggest that the performance of graceful restart is worthy of further investigation, with emphasis being placed on exploring procedures to optimise the performance of graceful restart

Graceful Termination -- Graceful Resetting

Correct — let alone graceful — termination of parallel systems is sometimes thought to be a difficult problem. This is particularly imagined to be so under the pure message-passing MIMD discipline of occam and transputer networks, where global operations (like setting a shared flag or abortions) are not allowed and where time-outs cannot be set for every communication. This paper describes some common, but erroneous, occam approaches to this problem and contrasts them with what can be done in Ada [0, 1, 2]. These methods are all rejected on the grounds of insecurity and performance overheads. A simple, legal, secure and efficient occam method is then presented. This method also solves a much more important problem — the general (or partial) resetting of a parallel system (or sub-system). The resetting mechanism is quite independent of the parallel application algorithm, which can therefore be developed without worrying about such matters. This separation of concerns is good software engineering and is fully supported by the occam philosophy. Finally, an application of this resetting mechanism is described that permits the dynamic reconstruction of occam network topologies

Use of context-awareness in mobile peer-to-peer networks

Mobile ad-hoc network are an emerging research field due to the potential range of applications that they support and for the problems they present due to their dynamic nature. Peer-to-peer is an example of a class of applications that have recently been deployed on top of ad-hoc networks. In this paper we propose an approach based on context-awareness to allow peer-to-peer applications to exploit information on the underlying network context to achieve better performance and better group organization. Information such as availability of resources, battery power, services in reach and relative distances can be used to improve the routing structures of the peer-to-peer network, thus reducing the routing overhead

An Algorithm for Odd Graceful Labeling of the Union of Paths and Cycles

In 1991, Gnanajothi [4] proved that the path graph P_n with n vertex and n-1 edge is odd graceful, and the cycle graph C_m with m vertex and m edges is odd graceful if and only if m even, she proved the cycle graph is not graceful if m odd. In this paper, firstly, we studied the graph C_m $\cup$ P_m when m = 4, 6,8,10 and then we proved that the graph C_ $\cup$ P_n is odd graceful if m is even. Finally, we described an algorithm to label the vertices and the edges of the vertex set V(C_m $\cup$ P_n) and the edge set E(C_m $\cup$ P_n).Comment: 9 Pages, JGraph-Hoc Journa

DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability

The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints

The role of intelligent systems in delivering the smart grid

The development of "smart" or "intelligent" energy networks has been proposed by both EPRI's IntelliGrid initiative and the European SmartGrids Technology Platform as a key step in meeting our future energy needs. A central challenge in delivering the energy networks of the future is the judicious selection and development of an appropriate set of technologies and techniques which will form "a toolbox of proven technical solutions". This paper considers functionality required to deliver key parts of the Smart Grid vision of future energy networks. The role of intelligent systems in providing these networks with the requisite decision-making functionality is discussed. In addition to that functionality, the paper considers the role of intelligent systems, in particular multi-agent systems, in providing flexible and extensible architectures for deploying intelligence within the Smart Grid. Beyond exploiting intelligent systems as architectural elements of the Smart Grid, with the purpose of meeting a set of engineering requirements, the role of intelligent systems as a tool for understanding what those requirements are in the first instance, is also briefly discussed