Abstract
One characteristic of biological organisms that is desirable in engineering systems is the ability to tolerate faults in their components. Fault tolerance in artificial cellular systems is generally achieved by either time-redundancy or hardware-redundancy. In hardware redundancy spare cells are introduced so that when an active cell fails, a spare substitutes it. In the embryonic hardware architecture designed at York, this hardware redundancy is achieved in a multi-cellular system inspired by cell embryology. In this paper the k-out-of-m reliability model is used to analyse the reconfiguration strategies used in embryonic arrays. Two schemes are investigated: row-( or column-) elimination and cell-elimination. The models proposed can be used to analyse the reliability of cellular systems with spares other than embryonic arrays.