Resource scavenging in object-oriented, real-time, fault-tolerant control systems

This paper presents a variety of resource management techniques for real-time, fault-tolerant control systems. These techniques are based on resource scavenging, a concept that is introduced in this paper. Resource scavenging techniques attempt to meet transient resource shortfalls in one part of the system by reassigning resources from other parts of the system. The techniques presented take advantage of properties of real-time, fault-tolerant systems in general and some specific properties of control applications. At the same time, the techniques are constrained by control related requirements of the applications. The specific properties of a control application and its requirements are communicated to the system infrastructure entirely in terms of control concepts. Such a system infrastructure is also described in the paper. Finally, the paper proposes an extension to the programming language C++ that will simplify the development of applications that take advantage of resource scavenging techniques.