Ameliorating Thermally Accelerated Aging With State-Based Application of Fault-Tolerance in Cyber-Physical Computers

Cyber-physical systems have become more prevalent in recent years. Computer control is increasingly being considered for use in applications which are operationally resource-constrained and are very cost-sensitive, while requiring very high reliability. The primary approach to building ultra-reliable systems is to deploy massive redundancy. However, the constraints just mentioned make it very difficult to use the massive everywhere-redundancy approaches used in such traditional (relatively cost-insensitive) applications as aerospace. In this paper, we address such problems by adaptively adjusting fault-tolerance levels according to the current state of the controlled plant. Such an approach imposes far less thermal stress on the computer, thereby enhancing reliability, and thus requiring a smaller number of line-replaceable units to maintain required levels of reliability over any given period of operation.