Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 25-8 - 21

Technical Committee on Fault
Tolerant Measurement Systems
Ye Chow Kuang, Lorenzo Ciani, and Melanie Ooi
T
he goal of Technical Committee on Fault Tolerant
Measurement Systems (TC-32) is to promote the research,
training and outreach activities that cover
all aspects of theory and practices of ensuring trustworthy
measurement results under every operating condition. This
is especially important in critical infrastructures where the
cost of failure is very high. In recent years, TC-32 promotes
and supports technical activities in reliable computation,
propagation of uncertainty in signal processing systems and
architectures/infrastructures/workflows to ensure fault tolerant
instrumentation and measurements.
The Department of Information Engineering of the University
of Florence's " Measurement, Reliability and Safety "
Laboratory research covers testing, automatic fault diagnosis
and condition monitoring, health prognosis and risk
assessment in various sectors such as automotive, biomedical
engineering, railway, and energy. An example of these research
activities is a vibration test plan is set up to investigate
the reliability and functional performances of a set of DC-DC
converters to be used in
self-powered diagnostic
modules, shown in Fig. 1.
The vibration stress during
the experiments has
been used to investigate the
presence of possible early
failure or intrinsic malfunctions
before installation
on the field. Furthermore,
by tailoring the stress to
the actual operating conditions,
it is possible to study
the performance of the devices
and characterize their
behavior to identify if the
real stress endured in the
field could lead to drifts, errors
and even failures.
November 2022
Other than promoting academic research topics, outreach
and networking activities have been an important part of TC32.
The committee has groomed and promoted several early
career members into recipients of Society Awards such as the
Graduate Fellowship Award and the Outstanding Young Engineer
Award. These members are now active and valuable
members of the Instrumentation and Measurement Society.
TC-32 members have over a decade of work on various
programs that improve workforce skills. Between
2008-2018, several award-winning international education
programs were developed to improve workforce skill-readiness
for semiconductor manufacturing in South East Asian
countries. Since 2018, the Metrology Society of Australasia
(MSA) has identified various metrology skill gaps in the
younger members of the Australasian workforce. TC-32 in
the region, led by members from the University of Waikato
in Hamilton, New Zealand, coordinated the development
of education modules through international industryuniversity
collaborations.
Fig. 1. Experimental setup used to characterize the electrical and reliability performance of multiple DC-DC converters
under vibration stress conditions.
IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine
1094-6969/22/$25.00©2022IEEE
21

Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 25-8

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 25-8