Concepts of Self-Repairing Systems

Systems fail. Period. No matter how much planning and fault analysis is performed, it is impossible to create a perfectly reliable machine. The existing approach to improving reliability invariably involves advances in fault prediction and detection to include specific mechanisms to overcome a particular failure or mitigate its effect. While this has gone a long way in increasing the operational life of a machine, the overall complexity of systems has improved sharply, and it is becoming more and more difficult to predict and account for all possible failure modes. What is discussed here is a possible shift in approach from specific repair strategies to autonomous self-repair. Rather than focusing on mitigating or reducing the probability of failure, the focus is instead on what can be done to correct a failure that will invariably occur at some point during operation. By taking this approach, it is not just expected failure that can be designed for, unexpected failure modes are also inherently compensated for, extending the potential life of a system and reducing the need for through-life servicing.