Tolerating failures of continuous-valued sensors

Abstract

One aspect of fault-tolerance in process control programs is the ability to tolerate sensor failure. This paper presents a methodology for transforming a process control program that cannot tolerate sensor failures into one that can. Issues addressed include modifying specifications in order to accommodate uncertainty in sensor values and averaging sensor values in a fault-tolerant manner. In addition, a hierarchy of sensor failure models is identified, and both the attainable accuracy and the run-time complexity of sensor averaging with respect to this hierarchy is discussed.