Gemund, “Automated redesign with the General Redesign Engine

Abstract: Given a system design (SD), a key task is to optimize this design to reduce the probability of catastrophic failures. We consider the task of redesigning an SD to minimize the probability of particular faults by introducing components selected from a component library. We have implemented a General Redesign Engine (GRE), which uses model-based reasoning techniques and Boolean functional synthesis from component libraries, to automate redesign for combinational circuits. For a significant subset of observations leading to catastrophic (forbidden) modes we demonstrate that GRE trades off redesign cost for increased fault tolerance, and shows a significant advantage compared to the Triple-Modular Redundancy (TMR) method. Our algorithm has a wide application in AI, including automated software and hardware design, error detection, reconfiguration and recovery, and modular robotics