Analysis of the redundant architecture for the fault-tolerance of a distributed control system

The distributed digital control system has many shared common components, and a single fault in the system may have effects on not a single function. Not as in an analog system, the faults in a digital system usually make discrete and abrupt changes in its output, which are hard to be expected. To cope with these situations, the fault-tolerance is an inevitable property of a distributed control system. A distributed digital control system consists of many equipments, and each equipment can be implemented by many different technologies. The fault-tolerance has to be implemented depend-ing on the overall architecture and how each equipment is implemented. The paper analyzes and compares the strategies and tactics to add the fault-tolerances in a distributed digital control system, and studies how they can be combined appropriately.