The physical and control structure of manufacturing systems is described, and a hierarchical model for supporting fault tolerance is proposed. The main advantage of the model is that it allows different fault tolerance and recovery techniques to be used in different segments of the network. To help in the choice of specific techniques in particular network segments, a set of metrics to evaluate fault tolerance techniques is presented along with preliminary ideas about integrating the different techniques. Design issues in applying the model to a given manufacturing system are discussed.
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