I feel kind of stupid asking this question, but after unsuccessfully searching for papers and then starting to draw my own solution with a lot of XORs to the following problem, I started wondering about how fundamental the problem was, and that literature must already have an solution:
Imagine you have got two controllers, one being a master and one being a slave. Some outside power can tell the slave to be the master at any time, e.g. when the current master is unreachable. As both controllers are connected to some actuator there must be some kind of safe form of mutual exclusion that prevents all foreseeable error scenarios. To accommodate for loss of power or the current master not reverting his master status after a new master was crowned (e.g. if it never received that information) I tought about letting each controller produce additional output signals, e.g. signaling that the controller is the master, and mixing them between logical 0 and 1 (to filter some illegal constellations e.g. 1 & 1 which may be produced through short circuits and the like, or 0 & 0 in case of power loss). These addional signals should then determine which signal path (the actual control signal for the mutually exclusivly accessed actuator) should be blocked and which one shall let the signals pass.
Is there a name for such mechanisms and are there any good papers describing these methods / exclusive access strategies?
