Actuator Design Pattern

Although the implementations used in s@rdalya are pretty simplistic; in real life actuator design pattern, or to be more specific Monitor-Actuator Design Pattern, is a crucial pattern in Embedded Software Design.

Monitor-Actuator pattern can also be thought as a special case of diverse-redundancy pattern.

The pattern separates the system into two channels. One channel (actuator) does the action. The second channel (monitor) checks the environment to ensure that the action does what it is supposed to.

If the actuator channel fails, the monitor channel identifies it to the Controller.

If the monitor channel fails, then actuation continues to work correctly (assuming isolation of single-point failures).