Supervision and Robust Fault-Tolerant Control of a Nonlinear Reconfigurable Process

Authors

Abstract

A supervisory fault-tolerant control system architecture is proposed for a nonlinear reconfigurable process. The model-based approach considers a set of linear models with uncertainty to describe the nominal fault-free behaviour and the faulty cases of the plant. On the basis of the supervisory control system, a fault diagnosis system generates residual signals applying a robust control technique. In order to preserve the system performance and to accommodate the expected faults, the supervisor generates remedial actions using the fault diagnosis information and the estimation of the nonlinear system's outputs considering an observer-based approach. The supervisor exploits the physical or analytical redundancy, reconfiguring the inputs, the outputs or switching the controller whenever severe faults occur. The proposed approach was applied to a nonlinear reconfigurable system: the Three-Tank benchmark plant.

Keywords

Fault-tolerant control, supervision, fault diagnosis, control reconfiguration

Subject

Fault-Tolerance in Control Systems

Conference

12th IEEE International Conference on Methods and Models in Automation and Robotics - MMAR 2006, August 2006