Design of embedded control systems

The paper presents some guidelines supported by a case study of a design of a fault tolerant computer control system. It was devised and implemented as a laboratory platform for the 5th framework project IFATIS. Instead of the redundancy, in this project it is proposed to deal with faults by dynamic reconfiguration of the resources that are still viable after an incident. The goal of the design presented in this paper is to provide a consistent sophisticated distributed control system, tolerant to faults. In the paper, first general outlook of the IFATIS architecture is given. Based on that, hardware platform has been designed and implemented, together with the system, application support and design software. The idea is to deal with the faults on the lowest level and resolve them if possible in order to prevent the higher-level mechanisms to have to employ more costly measures.