Extension to matlab/simulink for design and implementation of distributed fault-tolerant control systems
V. Domen, O. Rok · 2005
Abslrucl - In this paper an approach to design and implementation of fault-tolerant distributed control. system is described. It is based on the Matlab/SimuIink toolset and it runs on an experimental hardware platform. The platform was built as a part of the Intelligent Fault Tolerant Control in Integrated System - IFATIS project to test several approaches on how to deal with fault tolerance in computer control sj-stems, The MatlablSimulink suite is one or the most widely used software packages in academia and industry for modeling dynamic systems. It provides broad support for control application design, testing and simulation. It can also generate an object code of the application for different kinds of target platforms. Howevcr, it has several limitations for building distributed control applications. To provide for this and to provide support for different fault lolerant methods, the toolset was expanded. To isolate the issues of hardware from the control application design, a middleware layer was introduced by means of distributed shared memory cells. Appropriate representation of those cells was added lo the MatlablSimulink toolset. Additional blocks were introduced to indicate and signa1 different faults in the system and yet another set of blocks were used for system management. Also, to automate the process of the development cycle additional scripts were added that integrate the MatlablSimulink toolset with other tools from the IFATIS projcct.