On the Design of Fault-Tolerance in a Decentralized Software Platform for Power Systems

Purboday Ghosh, Scott Eisele, Abhishek Dubey, Mary Metelko, Istv\'an Madari, P\'eter V\"olgyesi, Gabor Karsai

IEEE 22nd International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing, ISORC 2019, Valencia, Spain 2019

PDF DOI

Why This Matters

Smart Grid systems require distributed, real-time embedded computing to handle complex and dynamic environments. Traditional centralized approaches lack the scalability and resilience needed for modern power grid operations. RIAPS addresses this gap by providing a layered fault management architecture that separates application logic from platform services, enabling developers to build highly resilient systems without managing low-level failure detection and recovery mechanisms.

What We Did

This paper presents RIAPS (Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid), an open-source distributed platform for implementing fault-tolerant software in power systems. The work describes the architectural design and implementation of RIAPS, which distributes monitoring and control functions across networked computing nodes. The platform supports various communication patterns including pub-sub and request-reply messaging, enabling resilient and reliable operation across multiple physical layers.

Key Results

The paper demonstrates RIAPS capabilities through detailed architectural documentation and a complex energy application case study. The platform successfully implements fault detection and mitigation at multiple system layers (physical device, platform services, and application levels), with resource monitoring capabilities for CPU, memory, network, and disk usage. The evaluation shows effective fault tolerance implementation across various failure scenarios.

Full Abstract

Cite This Paper

@inproceedings{Ghosh2019,
  author = {Ghosh, Purboday and Eisele, Scott and Dubey, Abhishek and Metelko, Mary and Madari, Istv{\'{a}}n and V{\"{o}}lgyesi, P{\'{e}}ter and Karsai, Gabor},
  booktitle = {IEEE} 22nd International Symposium on Real-Time Distributed Computing, {ISORC} 2019, Valencia, Spain},
  title = {On the Design of Fault-Tolerance in a Decentralized Software Platform for Power Systems},
  year = {2019},
  pages = {52--60},
  abstract = {The vision of the `Smart Grid' assumes a distributed real-time embedded system that implements various monitoring and control functions. As the reliability of the power grid is critical to modern society, the software supporting the grid must support fault tolerance and resilience in the resulting cyber-physical system. This paper describes the fault-tolerance features of a software framework called Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid (RIAPS). The framework supports various mechanisms for fault detection and mitigation and works in concert with the applications that implement the grid-specific functions. The paper discusses the design philosophy for and the implementation of the fault tolerance features and presents an application example to show how it can be used to build highly resilient systems.},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org},
  biburl = {https://dblp.org/rec/bib/conf/isorc/GhoshEDMMVK19},
  category = {selectiveconference},
  contribution = {minor},
  doi = {10.1109/ISORC.2019.00018},
  file = {:Ghosh2019-On_the_Design_of_Fault-Tolerance_in_a_Decentralized_Software_Platform_for_Power_Systems.pdf:PDF},
  keywords = {RIAPS, fault tolerance, distributed systems, smart grid, middleware, resilience, component-based architecture, real-time systems},
  project = {cps-middleware,cps-reliability},
  tag = {platform,decentralization,power},
  timestamp = {Wed, 16 Oct 2019 14:14:53 +0200},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ISORC.2019.00018}
}
Quick Info
Year 2019
DOI 10.1109/ISORC.2019.00018
Keywords
RIAPS fault tolerance distributed systems smart grid middleware resilience component-based architecture real-time systems
Research Areas
energy middleware CPS scalable AI
Search Tags

Design, Fault, Tolerance, Decentralized, Software, Platform, Power, Systems, RIAPS, fault tolerance, distributed systems, smart grid, middleware, resilience, component-based architecture, real-time systems, energy, CPS, scalable AI, 2019, Ghosh, Eisele, Dubey, Metelko, Madari, V\"olgyesi, Karsai