On the Construction of Minimally Redundant Reliable System Designs

Iii complex binary digital systems employing a large number of blocks of electrical equipment it often is difficult to ensure a sufficient level of reliability of each single block of equipment. An attempt to attain the desired degree of reliability by improving the reliability of each block may prove to be uneconomical. On the other hand, by introducing some redundancy in the system, it is possible to construct highly reliable complex systems, even though each single block is not as highly reliable. Moore and Shannon,2 Tryon,3 Von Neumann, 4 Lofgren5 and Armstrong1 have considered the problem of constructing reliable system designs. In this paper a general mathematical theory has been developed for the construction of minimally redundant reliable system designs, based on the scheme outlined by Armstrong.1 This theory is closely related to the theory of error-correcting codes. The problem of constructing minimally redundant system designs whose outputs will be free of error whenever there is fault in at most one block of the system is completely solved in this paper. 595