Key laboratory of ministry of education for image processing and intelligent control, Department of control science and engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, 430074, China

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Abstract—Transient faults are hard to be detected and located due to their unpredictable nature and short duration, and they are the dominant causations of system failures, which makes it necessary to consider transient fault-tolerant design in the development of modern safety-critical industrial system. In this paper an approach based on system theory is proposed to tolerate the transient faults in tunnel construction wireless monitoring and control systems (TCWMCS), in which the effects of transient faults are expressed by dysfunction of interactions among software applications. After analyzing the dysfunctional interactions of the system by the operational process model and educing the causes of dysfunction in the functional control diagram, a safety enhancement way is proposed for the designers, in which effictive safety constraints are set up to tolerate the transient faults. The experiment evaluation indicated that the effects of transient faults could be exposed by the causal factors of dysfunctional interactions and system safety could be enhanced by the enforcement of appropriate constraints.

Index Terms—transient faults, dysfuncional interactions, wireless monitoring and control system, system approach, hazardous action, safety constraints

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Cite: Xiongfeng Huang, Chunjie Zhou, Yuanqing Qin, Ye Wang, Mingyue Yang, "Transient Fault Tolerance and System Safety Enhancement Based on System Theory," Journal of Software vol. 6, no. 10, pp. 2082-2089, 2011.