Constraint checking during error recovery

The system-level software onboard a spacecraft is responsible for recovery from communication, power, thermal, and computer-health anomalies that may occur. The recovery must occur without disrupting any critical scientific or engineering activity that is executing at the time of the error. Thus, the error-recovery software may have to execute concurrently with the ongoing acquisition of scientific data or with spacecraft maneuvers. This work provides a technique by which the rules that constrain the concurrent execution of these processes can be modeled in a graph. An algorithm is described that uses this model to validate that the constraints hold for all concurrent executions of the error-recovery software with the software that controls the science and engineering activities of the spacecraft. The results are applicable to a variety of control systems with critical constraints on the timing and ordering of the events they control

Tree-based Algorithm to Find the k-th Value in Distributed Systems

In this paper, we study distributed algorithms for finding the k-th value in the decentralized systems. First we consider the case of circular configuration of processors where no processor knows the total number of participants. Later a network of arbitrary configuration is examined and a tree-based algorithm is proposed. The proposed algorithm requires O(N) messages and O(log N) rounds of message passing, where N is the number of nodes in the network