Dependability of Communications in Critical Real-Time Control Systems
Anis Youssef, Agnan de Bonneval, Yves Crouzet · 2001
With the increasing interest in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) it is likely that they will be massively deployed in future control systems. Their use raises many new challenges: generic ones and more specific ones depending on the field of application. Considering control systems made of calculators and passive components (actuators and sensors), we have started investigating dependable communication allowing to integrate MEMS on a large-scale (or MEMS network), as for example thousands of micro-actuators acting as a substitute for a current actuator. These changes require to define, to evaluate and to validate new communication systems in terms of architectures and protocols, and consequently their dependability so that the future control systems will be as much dependable as the current ones. In this prospect, we will first define solutions for control systems without MEMS. This article presents the first steps of our work. After a brief description of the kind of systems we consider, we will state the basic problems of integration of MEMS networks in control systems, and present the basis of the proposed architecture and the protocols we will use. Then, we will describe the dependability aspects we will focus on, the risks we have identified,