CAREER: Algorithms for Design of Active Fault-Tolerant Systems

该学院早期职业发展(CALEAR)项目的重点是预测物理系统中的故障并在发生严重故障时保持功能，这在许多技术领域都是一个常见的挑战，具有重大的伦理和经济重要性。虽然传统的容错方法依赖于诸如冗余、安全裕度和预防性维护等被动措施，但该项目将开发一种新的主动方法。这种方法不断地从感官数据中重建当前系统的模型，并使用这些模型来评估故障和不确定性，并使用现场设计自动化来生成补偿操作。这种方法将应用于不同规模和复杂程度的准静态系统和动态系统。如果成功，这项研究的更广泛的影响将导致系统自主识别和警告潜在故障的能力，甚至维持运行和从某种形式的损害中恢复的能力。随着系统变得越来越复杂，需要从被动容错过渡到主动容错，在主动容错中，系统可以自动诊断和修复故障。这里提出的方法是领域独立的，因此可以应用于许多复杂的系统，而不是建议的工作中明确涉及的系统，例如生物系统的建模和医学诊断。教育活动将专注于扩展容错设计的本科课程，以及更广泛的推广计划，其目标是通过一个跨越几个科学领域的3D可打印教育模型库，加强对儿童和学生的动手工程和科学教育

The focus of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is on predicting malfunction in a physical system and maintaining functionality in spite of severe faults, a common challenge in many technical fields, and of great ethical and economic importance. While traditional methods for fault-tolerance rely on passive measures such as redundancy, safety margins, and preventative maintenance, this project will develop a new active approach. This approach continuously reconstructs models of the current system from sensory data, and uses these models to assess failure and uncertainty, and to generate compensatory actions using design automation in-situ. This approach will be applied and evaluated on both quasi-static systems and dynamical systems across various scales and complexities.If successful, the broader impacts of this research will lead to improvements in the ability of systems to autonomously identify and warn about potential failure, and even sustain operation and recover from some forms of damage. As systems are becoming increasingly complex, there is a need to transition from passive fault tolerance to active fault tolerance, where systems that can diagnose and repair faults autonomously. The method proposed here is domain-independent, and as such may be applied across many complex systems beyond those explicitly addressed in the proposed work, such as modeling of biological systems and medical diagnosis.Educational activities will focus both on expansion of undergraduate curriculum in design for fault tolerance, and on a broader outreach program whose goal is to enhance hands-on engineering and science education for children and students through a library of 3D-printable educational models across several scientific fields