Fault-tolerant cooperative control of networked discrete-event systems

Networked discrete-event systems like smart manufacturing systems consist of subsystems, which are physically coupled and digitally connected by a communication network. The subsystems are able to solve their local tasks autonomously and to cooperate with another subsystem if necessary. In the second situation, the network units of both subsystems initiate the cooperation via the communication network. The flexibility of the subsystems to solve autonomous and cooperative tasks demonstrates an important property that is required for manufacturing systems in Industry 4.0. The paper concerns the situation that a fault occurs within a subsystem, which has to be detected and the controller has to be adapted. To this aim, the subsystems are extended by a diagnostic unit and a reconfiguration unit. The diagnostic unit detects and identifies the fault, whereas the reconfiguration unit applies a locally reconfigured controller. It is shown that if the fault has the property to be networked reconfigurable, the fault is locally reconfigurable without affecting the overall system. Copyright (c) The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0)