Mission reliability of an automatic control system integrated with distributed intelligent built-in-test systems

This paper introduces distributed-centralized Built-in-Test (BIT) systems interfaced with an automatic control system wi th the purpose of improving mission reliability. By Using a block diagramming method, a complicated system is decomposed into mutually exclusive subsystems so that a distributed BIT is connected to each subsystem for multiple parallel processing of fault detection. The data produced by the distributed BITs is sent to a central control processor. We present a Markov process approach to analytical ly derive the mission reliability of an automatic control fault-tolerant system with distributed BITs. As diagnostic mistakes of the BIT. the false alarm and fault missing of BIT are considered with the malfunction of the BIT itself. Numerical examples are also prepared to evaluate the performance of distributed intelligent BITs, by comparing mission reliabilities corresponding to the variation of design parameters in a time domain. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.