In: Annual Review in Automatic Programming Vol. 14, pt. 1; Real Time Programming 1988, Proceedings of the 15th IFAC-IFIP Workshop, Valencia, Spain, pages 75-81. Elmsford, NY, USA: Pergamon Press Inc., 1988.
Abstract: This work presents concepts and techniques developed for real-time control of an industrial manufacturing system. The overall architecture of the system is centered around a triple schema: 1) Use of off-line testing techniques of the computer support; 2) Use of an abstract copy of the application software acting as a generalized watch-dog, the spy; and 3) Use of special error detecting/correcting codes for essential information. In this paper the authors introduce the ideas and techniques that define the spy. Because the kind of system to be controlled is highly concurrent, Petri nets were adopted as the formal tool to describe concurrency.
Keywords: safe implementation (of) concurrent system(s); industrial manufacturing system; fault detection; spy, watch-dog; error detecting, correcting code.