Design of Fault-Tolerant Distributed Cyber–Physical Systems for Smart Environments

Cyber–physical systems are more and more employed to implement smart environments also in safety-critical scenarios. We here propose a novel system-level design approach capable of considering two relevant aspects of such systems: 1) elaborations together with sensing and actuation need to be placed in the zones where cyber–physical interactions take place and 2) fault-tolerance mechanisms have to be incorporated to tolerate device failures. The proposed design approach identifies the optimal instantiation of the system architecture and deployment of the applications to minimize the monetary cost of the solution while guaranteeing resource requirements and fault tolerance. Experimental results show that the proposed approach reduces up to 20% the solution cost w.r.t. a straightforward hardening baseline with a computationally viable execution time.