A Novel Fuzzy Membership Partitioning for Improved Voting in Fault Tolerant System

Abstract

This paper presents a novel technique for improved voting by adaptively varying the membership boundaries of a fuzzy voter to achieve realistic consensus among inputs of redundant modules of a fault tolerant system. We demonstrate that suggested dynamic membership partitioning minimizes the number of occurrences of incorrect outputs of a voter as compared to the fixed membership partitioning voter implementations. Simulation results for the proposed voter for Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) fault tolerant system indicate that our algorithm shows better safety and availability performance as compared to the existing one. However, our voter design is general and thus it can be potentially useful for improving safety and availability of critical fault tolerant systems.