Simulation of a component-oriented voter library for dependable control applications

Control systems are required to meet increasingly stringent reliability and safety constraints. In many industrial applications, arbitration between redundant subsystems using voting algorithms is popular. Many voting strategies implemented in hardware or software have been proposed, of which majority and median voters have been widely used in real applications. Detailed analysis of voters shows that they can be considered as a combination of independent components, each performing a specific function. The simulation of a component oriented model of voters is addressed. A library of components has been provided and the simulated model of component oriented model of a voter is introduced. The generality of the model supports the analysis of a large number of voter permutations. The paper presents the simulation results of a novel component oriented voter, the smoothing voter, which combines the safety properties of the majority voter with the advantages of mid value selection strategy. This work presents a first step toward the automatic insertion and implementation of voting algorithms using a software design environment