Bjarne Johansson

Dependable Distributed Control System: Redundancy and Concurrency Defects

Student   Bjarne Johansson
Advisors   Thomas Nolte
Alessandro V. Papadopoulos
Faculty Reviewer   Luis Almeida, University of Porto, Portugal
Grading Committee   Petru Eles, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
Kristina Kunert, Umeå University, Sweden
Johan Åkerberg, Mälardalen University, Sweden (reserve)
Defence   Mälardalen University, Västerås, Sweden
Room Gamma and Zoom meeting (Link will be made public)
November 8th, 2022 13:15
Abstract   Intelligent devices, interconnectivity, and information exchange are characteristics often associated with Industry 4.0. A peer-to-peer-oriented architecture with the network as the system center succeeds the traditional controller-centric topology used in today’s distributed control systems, improving information exchange in future designs. The network-centric architecture allows for the usage of IT solutions such as cloud, fog, and edge computing in the automation industry. These are IT solutions that rely on virtualization techniques such as virtual machines and containers. Virtualization technology, combined with virtual instance management, provide the famous elasticity that cloud computing offers. Container management systems like Kubernetes can scale the number of containers to match the service demand and re-deploy containers affected by failures.
Distributed control systems constitute the automation infrastructure core in many critical applications and domains. The criticality puts high dependability requirements upon the systems, i.e., dependability is essential. High-quality software and redundancy solutions are examples of traditional ways to increase dependability. Dependability is the common denominator for the challenges addressed in this thesis. Challenges that range from concurrency defect localization with static code analysis to utilization of failure recovery mechanisms provided by container management systems in a control system context.
In this thesis, we evaluate the feasibility of locating concurrency defects in embedded industrial software with static code analysis. Furthermore, we propose a deployment agnostic failure detection and role selection mechanism for controller redundancy in a network-centric context. Finally, we use the container management system Kubernetes to orchestrate a cluster of virtualized controllers. We evaluate the failure recovery properties of the container management system in combination with redundant virtualized controllers - redundant controllers using the proposed failure detection and role selection solution.
Rules and Guidelines   The Lic procedure summary
Rules for Third-cycle Studies at MDH - Chapter 3.1.7 Public Defence of a Thesis
Instructions regarding public defences and licentiate seminars on account of the outbreak of Covid19 (Coronavirus)
Thesis   Thesis
Included Papers   Paper A: Concurrency defect localization in embedded systems using static code analysis: an evaluation .
Paper B: Heartbeat bully: Failure detection and redundancy role selection for network-centric controller .
Paper C: Kubernetes orchestration of high availability distributed control systems .
Publications   Complete list of publications

Back to Research

Last modified: 2023-10-04 09:28:42 +0200