A reliability improvement method for reconfigurable information and oil production control systems
Fault tolerance, a way to obtain system dependability, is extremely important in domains such as aircraft and spacecraft industries, energy plants, and oil processing and oil producing industries. For information and control systems (ICSs) with performance redundancy, fault tolerance is provided by a special reconfiguration procedure which relates to the monitoring and control task distribution among the operable computational nodes. At the same time, the reliability function of the ICS depends on the computational node load intensity: as the node load (and temperature) increases, the failure rate also increases. This is the cornerstone of the reliability improvement method we present in this paper: to control and improve the reliability function of the system by the configuration formation process. We describe our approach in detail, present a formal model of the ICS configuration formation problem, and give and discuss experimental results.