Actuator Update Management for Reliability Enhancement in Cyber-Physical Systems

The feedback control of a cyber-physical system consists of a sensor-cyber-actuator pipeline. Controls are typically updated periodically and held constant between updates. The Quality of Control (QoC) as well as the failure rate of the cyber platform both depend on the update rate. Recently, researchers have begun to study cyber-physical systems where the cyber platform is allowed to miss a few deadlines due to computational overruns. Both reactive and proactive approaches have been considered; however, the focus hitherto has been on the impact this has on the controlled plant QoC. No attention has been paid to the impact of such approaches on the reliability of the cyber platform. This article, on the other hand, focuses on the tradeoff between the plant QoC and the cyber platform reliability with static voltage/frequency scaling.