Architecture and Mechanism Design for Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Etherware for Networked Control

We believe that a standard control software framework which enables rapid, reliable and evolvable application development is the key for the proliferation of the networked control systems. Accordingly, we have been working on developing a domainware for general purpose control system, called Etherware. Even though Etherware supports many of the distributed system domain requirements, it still needs further advances to be more suitable as a middleware for control systems. In this paper, we present an architecture and mechanisms for an enhanced middleware that supports networked control system design through enabling temporally correct interactions. We also propose an architecture and mechanisms for enhancing the robustness of networked control systems to faults, that we are currently implementing.