Design and Implementation of a Reconfigurable Corrective Control System Subject to Permanent Faults in the Controller

This article presents a reconfiguration strategy for the corrective controller achieving model matching control of an input/state asynchronous sequential machine (ASM). The considered controller is vulnerable to permanent faults that degenerate a subset of the controller’s states. If the controller has a certain amount of redundancy in terms of its states, one can build a reconfiguration scheme in which the functionality of degenerated states is taken over by supplementary states. The proposed reconfiguration scheme is superior to conventional methods of fault tolerance with hardware redundancy since the required number of redundant states is much smaller. Hardware experiments on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuits are provided to validate the applicability of the proposed scheme. The present study serves as the first research report on the reconfigurable corrective controller.