Fault tolerant sensing model for cyber-physical systems

A sensing system is capable of making decisions by using information captured through physical and virtual objects and providing value added information to enhance its global context awareness. Sensing system forms one of the core components of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) which provide the interface for data collection from physical world and detecting various situations. Thus, it becomes critical to develop sensing model that is fault tolerant towards the failure of components such as sensors and actuators. This will enable realization of CPSs that will continue to run even when the interface to the physical world fails. This research work presents the model for defining sensing model for representing sensors and actuators and creating virtual objects that will enable data regeneration when the physical devices fails. The data regeneration algorithm is based on the virtual instance attributed with contextual details of the deployed physical devices. Fault tolerant systems in an important research area for CPSs and this paper addresses this challenge to enable development of robust and smart CPSs.