Issues in Multi-valued Multi-modal Sensor Fusion

Fault-tolerance of embedded systems with sensors is a major concern in emerging cyber-physical systems, which could be operating in the harsh and hostile environments. Sensors are usually deployed with redundancy, but traditional double and triple redundancies lead us to high cost and energy consumption. In this paper, we first propose a SAT-based algorithm to solve the Multi-Modal Sensor Allocation problem (MMSA). Further, we present a heterogeneous backup scheme with low overhead. It is also shown that by properly tuning the sensors, their sensitivity towards errors decreases. We show that when MMSA problem is extended for n-valued sensors, the effectiveness of the solution can be improved.