Life lessons from and for distributed MPC – Part 2: Choice of decision makers

This paper and an accompanying paper (McNamara et al., 2018) revisit the Distributed Predictive Control (DMPC) literature and seek to establish links with the social behaviour, focusing in particular on ways in which DMPC could be used to provide insights into the mechanisms of group regulation in social systems. It will be noted that there are major differences between the way in which DMPC algorithms and Social Human Participants (SHPs) form their respective decisions. Whereas in a first paper (McNamara et al., 2018) we concentrated on the dynamics of the cooperation and the weightings in the agents’ decision, the present paper extends the discussion to the arrangements in the group of decision makers. This paper concludes with some caveats as regards further analyses of social system using the methods proposed in these two papers

A fault tolerant control scheme based on sensor-actuation channel switching and dwell time

The present paper deals with a switching control scheme for a plant with multiple estimator-controller-actuator pairs. The scheme has to deal with specific problems originated by the switching between the different feedback loops and accommodate to faults in the observation channels (sensors outputs). The main contribution is a fault tolerant switching scheme with stability guarantees assured by a pre-imposed dwell-time. The detection and the fault tolerance capabilities are assured through set separation for the residual signals corresponding to healthy and faulty functioning. Another contribution of the paper resides in a recovery technique for faulty sensors which makes use of a virtual sensor whose estimation, based on an optimization procedure, minimizes recovery time

A fault tolerant control scheme based on sensor-actuation channel switching and dwell time

International audienceThe present paper proposes a switching control scheme for a plant with multiple sensor–estimator/control–actuator pairs. The scheme is shown to handle the specific stability problems originated by the switching between the different feedback loops and accommodate to faults in the measurement (sensors) channels. The main contribution is a fault tolerant switching scheme with stability guarantees assured by a pre-imposed dwell time. The detection and the fault tolerance capabilities are achieved through the separation of sets associated with suitable residual signals corresponding to healthy and faulty functioning. Another contribution of the paper resides in a recovery technique for the post-fault reintegration of the biased estimations. This technique makes use of a virtual sensor whose associated estimation, based on an optimization procedure, minimizes the recovery time