Projects and Publications - A Distributed Fault Tolerant Architecture for Nuclear Reactor and Other Critical Process Control Applications

Myron Hecht, Jeffrey Agron, Herbert Hecht and K.H. Kim, "A Distributed Fault Tolerant Architecture for Nuclear Reactor and Other Critical Process Control Applications", Proc. Fault Tolerant Computer Symposium (FTCS-21), Montreal, Canada, June 1991

A distributed fault tolerant system for process control based on an enhancement of the Distributed Recovery Block has been implemented and integrated into a chemical processing system. Fault tolerance provisions in the system cover software faults by use of the distributed recovery block (DRB); hardware faults by means of replication and the DRB; system software faults by means of replication, loose coupling, periodic status messages, and a restart capability; and network faults by means of replication and diverse interconnection paths. Maintainability is enhanced through an automated restart capability and logging function resident on a system supervisor node.