Heartbeat Bully: Failure Detection and Redundancy Role Selection for Network-Centric Controller

High availability and reliability are fundamental for distributed control systems in the automation industry. Redundancy solutions, with duplicated hardware, is the common way to increase availability. With the advent of Industry 4.0, the automation industry is undergoing a paradigm shift; a peer-to-peer mesh oriented architecture is replacing the traditional hierarchical automation pyramid. With generic computational power provided anywhere in the cloud - device continuum, the conventional control centric solutions are becoming obsolete. The paradigm shift imposes new challenges and possibilities on the redundancy solutions used. We present and evaluate a hardware-agnostic algorithm suitable for failure detection and redundancy role selection in the new automation paradigm. The algorithm is modeled, evaluated and validated with the model checking tool UPPAAL.