Concepts of Self-Repairing Systems

Self-Repairing Mechanical Systems

This paper reviews several types of self-repairing systems developed in the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. We have developed a modular system capable of “self-assembly” and “self-repair.” The former means a set of units can form a given shape of the system without outside help; the latter means the system restores the original shape if an arbitrary part of the system is cut off. We show bot...

Reliability Analysis in Self-Repairing Embryonic Systems

One characteristic of biological organisms that is desirable in engineering systems is the ability to tolerate faults in their components. Fault tolerance in artificial cellular systems is generally achieved by either timeredundancy or hardware-redundancy. In hardware redundancy spare cells are introduced so that when an active cell fails, a spare substitutes it. In the embryonic hardware archi...

Exploiting Architectural Style for Self-repairing Systems

An increasingly important requirement for software systems is the capability to adapt at run time in order to accommodate varying resources, system errors, and changing requirements. For such self-repairing systems, one of the hard problems is determining when a change is needed, and knowing what kind of adaptation is required. In this paper we describe a partial solution in which stylized arch...

Toward Self-organizing, Self-repairing and Resilient Distributed Systems

Self-Repairing Disk Arrays

As the prices of magnetic storage continue to decrease, the cost of replacing failed disks becomes increasingly dominated by the cost of the service call itself. We propose to eliminate these calls by building disk arrays that contain enough spare disks to operate without any human intervention during their whole lifetime. To evaluate the feasibility of this approach, we have simulated the beha...