Reliability Modeling and Assessment for a Cyber-Physical System With a Complex Boundary Behavior

This article investigates the reliability of a special cyber-physical system (CPS) with an unreliable service and a complex boundary behavior. A flat semi-dormant multicontroller (FSDMC) model is constructed on a special CPS named arbitrated networked control system (ANCS) with dual channels. In this study, the dual-channel ANCS is considered as a Markov repairable system, which integrates the binary state of physical device failure and the multistate of information flow. The FSDMC is modeled as an N/(d,c)-M/M/c/K/SMWV queuing system with an unreliable service. A dual rate matrix method is proposed to solve the stationary distribution of the queuing system and obtain the closed-form matrix solution of the distribution. Based on the queuing model, an optimization model is established to minimize the proposed cost performance rate function. A particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to solve the optimization model and obtain the optimal values of the system parameters under stable conditions. The closed-form expression of the instantaneous availability of the FSDMC on the physical failure rate and repair rate of the controller is yielded iteratively. The linear relationship between system instantaneous failure rate and task instantaneous failure rate is expressed. The sensitivity of task failure rate to system parameters is analyzed. Several reliability metrics are used to evaluate system reliability and task reliability. Experiments are conducted in real application scenarios to compare the task reliability using redundancy technology and real parallel applications. Experiments show that the proposed reliability model can more effectively guarantee system reliability goals compared with its counterparts.