Reducing Risk by Managing Software Related Failures in Networked Control Systems

Managing risk is a central problem in the design and operation of networked control systems, and due to the increasing role and growing complexity of software in such systems, managing software related failures is becoming a central challenge. Even simple programming errors can cause catastrophic failures. Hence, it is vital to contain risks due to software related failures in such systems. Our main thesis is that most software related failures can be managed through relatively simple and generally applicable strategies, and such strategies can be effectively developed and reused with suitable support from software infrastructure such as middleware. We describe mechanisms in Etherware, our middleware for control over networks (Baliga and Kumar, 2005), for containing software failures, and demonstrate the effectiveness of these mechanisms through experiments in a vehicular control testbed