The impact of real-time on the fault-tolerant distributed RDC-Systems

The RDC-Systern (Really Distributed Computer Control System) developed by IITB has been successfully applied in many industrial automation projects. It provides distributed fault-tolerance and is based on a redundant fibre optical network. The application programs are highly real-time sensitive and are written in PEARL with extensions for distribution and fault-tolerance support. This paper gives a short outline of the main characteristics of RDC with respect to real-time, faulttolerance and distribution and summarises some lessons learnt from the multiple industrial applications in steel production and car manufacturing.