Transient Fault Tolerance and System Safety Enhancement Based on System Theory

Transient faults are hard to be detected and located due to their unpredictable nature and short duration, and they are the dominant causations of system failures, which makes it necessary to consider transient fault-tolerant design in the development of modern safety-critical industrial system. In this paper an approach based on system theory is proposed to tolerate the transient faults in tunnel construction wireless monitoring and control systems (TCWMCS), in which the effects of transient faults are expressed by dysfunction of interactions among software applications. After analyzing the dysfunctional interactions of the system by the operational process model and educing the causes of dysfunction in the functional control diagram, a safety enhancement way was proposed for the designers, in which effictive safety constraints were set up to tolerate the transient faults. The experiment evaluation indicated that the effects of transient faults could be exposed by the causal factors of dysfunctional interactions and system safety could be enhanced by the enforcement of  appropriate constraints.

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