On the Reliability and Flexibility of FPGAs for Fault Tolerance in Sectored Networked Control Systems

As Networked Control Systems grow more complex in industrial applications, moving network modules and cabling decrease overall system reliability. This paper presents an FPGA-based fault tolerance technique to reduce cabling and increase the overall reliability of such a system. A sectored sensor-to-actuator networked control system architecture with sensor-level sift-out modular redundancy is modeled and analyzed. The fault models considered in this study are Single Event Upsets and hard failures. A reliability analysis is then conducted to evaluate the reliability of each block in the system and study the overall system reliability. A generic reliability analysis is presented to investigate the flexibility of the fault tolerance technique and a case study demonstrates the reliability improvements over a system that does not utilize FPGAs and cable reduction.