An Agent-Based Fault Tolerance Mechanism for Dependable Medical Systems

The use of distributed systems and IT is growing, with automation being used more and more to facilitate our daily tasks. The need to remotely monitor a patient has driven one of important results of this growth: domestic medical systems. The latter are able to follow and maintain the condition of a patient in the patient's home. Monitoring is important in terms of saving time and also money. However, the critical nature of this task requires a high level of dependability. The aim of dependability is to satisfy the user's goal, which is that whatever the state and context of the overall system, its ability to control the operation of the medical device and to transmit files reporting the patient's condition (normal, critical, alert, etc.) must be continuously assured. This can be ensured by fault tolerance techniques. The authors' objective in this paper is to present a technique for fault tolerance in a domestic medical system. Briefly, their proposal integrates a smart concept into the system: agents for controlling the operation of the medical system and tolerating the faults that can occur.