Mathematical control of complex systems

Copyright © 2013 ZidongWang et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Communication Subsystems for Emerging Wireless Technologies

The paper describes a multi-disciplinary design of modern communication systems. The design starts with the analysis of a system in order to define requirements on its individual components. The design exploits proper models of communication channels to adapt the systems to expected transmission conditions. Input filtering of signals both in the frequency domain and in the spatial domain is ensured by a properly designed antenna. Further signal processing (amplification and further filtering) is done by electronics circuits. Finally, signal processing techniques are applied to yield information about current properties of frequency spectrum and to distribute the transmission over free subcarrier channels

Case-based reasoning combined with statistics for diagnostics and prognosis

Many approaches used for diagnostics today are based on a precise model. This excludes diagnostics of many complex types of machinery that cannot be modelled and simulated easily or without great effort. Our aim is to show that by including human experience it is possible to diagnose complex machinery when there is no or limited models or simulations available. This also enables diagnostics in a dynamic application where conditions change and new cases are often added. In fact every new solved case increases the diagnostic power of the system. We present a number of successful projects where we have used feature extraction together with case-based reasoning to diagnose faults in industrial robots, welding, cutting machinery and we also present our latest project for diagnosing transmissions by combining Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) with statistics. We view the fault diagnosis process as three consecutive steps. In the first step, sensor fault signals from machines and/or input from human operators are collected. Then, the second step consists of extracting relevant fault features. In the final diagnosis/prognosis step, status and faults are identified and classified. We view prognosis as a special case of diagnosis where the prognosis module predicts a stream of future features

Fault Diagnosis of Hybrid Systems with Dynamic Bayesian Networks and Hybrid Possible Conficts

Hybrid systems are very important in our society, we can find them in many engineering fields. They can develop a task by themselves or they can interact with people so they have to work in a nominal and safe state. Model-based Diagnosis (MBD) is a diagnosis branch that bases its decisions in models. This dissertation is placed in the MBD framework with Artificial Intelligence techniques, which is known as DX community. The kind of hybrid systems we focus on have a continuous behaviour commanded by discrete events. There are several works already done in the diagnosis of hybrid systems field. Most of them need to pre-enumerate all the possible modes in the system even if they are never visited during the process. To solve that problem, some authors have presented the Hybrid Bond Graph (HBG) modeling technique, that is an extension of Bond Graphs. HBGs do not need to enumerate all the system modes, they are built as the system visits them at run time. Regarding the faults that can appear in a hybrid system, they can be divided in two main groups: (1) Discrete faults, and (2) parametric or continuous faults. The discrete faults are related to the hybrid nature of the systems while the parametric or continuous faults appear as faults in the system parameters or in the sensors. Both types af faults have not been considered in a unified diagnosis architecture for hybrid systems. The diagnosis process can be divided in three main stages: Fault Detection, Fault Isolation and Fault Identification. Computing the set of Possible Conflicts (PCs) is a compilation technique used in MBD of continuous systems. They provide a decomposition of a system in subsystems with minimal analytical redundancy that makes the isolation process more efficient. They can be used for fault detection and isolation tasks by means of the Fault Signature Matrix (FSM). The FSM is a matrix that relates the different parameters (fault candidates) in a system and the PCs where they are used

Process operating mode monitoring : switching online the right controller

This paper presents a structure which deals with process operating mode monitoring and allows the control law reconfiguration by switching online the right controller. After a short review of the advances in switching based control systems during the last decade, we introduce our approach based on the definition of operating modes of a plant. The control reconfiguration strategy is achieved by online selection of an adequate controller, in a case of active accommodation. The main contribution lies in settling up the design steps of the multicontroller structure and its accurate integration in the operating mode detection and accommodation loop. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the operating mode detection and accommodation (OMDA) structure for which the design steps propose a method to study the asymptotic stability, switching performances improvement, and the tuning of the multimodel based detector

Methods for Probabilistic Fault Diagnosis: An Electrical Power System Case Study

Health management systems that more accurately and quickly diagnose faults that may occur in different technical systems on-board a vehicle will play a key role in the success of future NASA missions. We discuss in this paper the diagnosis of abrupt continuous (or parametric) faults within the context of probabilistic graphical models, more specifically Bayesian networks that are compiled to arithmetic circuits. This paper extends our previous research, within the same probabilistic setting, on diagnosis of abrupt discrete faults. Our approach and diagnostic algorithm ProDiagnose are domain-independent; however we use an electrical power system testbed called ADAPT as a case study. In one set of ADAPT experiments, performed as part of the 2009 Diagnostic Challenge, our system turned out to have the best performance among all competitors. In a second set of experiments, we show how we have recently further significantly improved the performance of the probabilistic model of ADAPT. While these experiments are obtained for an electrical power system testbed, we believe they can easily be transitioned to real-world systems, thus promising to increase the success of future NASA missions

Detection and Isolation of Simultaneous Additive and Parametric Faults in Nonlinear Stochastic Dynamical Systems

This paper presents a new fault detection and isolation scheme for dealing with simultaneous additive and parametric faults. The new design integrates a system for additive fault detection based on Castillo and Zufiria, 2009 and a new parametric fault detection and isolation scheme inspired in Munz and Zufiria, 2008 . It is shown that the so far existing schemes do not behave correctly when both additive and parametric faults occur simultaneously; to solve the problem a new integrated scheme is proposed. Computer simulation results are presented to confirm the theoretical studies

A robust fault diagnosis and forecasting approach based on Kalman filter and interval type-2 fuzzy logic for efficiency improvement of centrifugal gas compressor system

The paper proposes a robust faults detection and forecasting approach for a centrifugal gas compressor system, the mechanism of this approach used the Kalman filter to estimate and filtering the unmeasured states of the studied system based on signals data of the inputs and the outputs that have been collected experimentally on site. The intelligent faults detection expert system is designed based on the interval type-2 fuzzy logic. The present work is achieved by an important task which is the prediction of the remaining time of the system under study to reach the danger and/or the failure stage based on the Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, where the objective within the industrial application is to set the maintenance schedules in precisely time. The obtained results prove the performance of the proposed faults diagnosis and detection approach which can be used in several heavy industrial systemsPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Failure Prognosis of Wind Turbine Components

Wind energy is playing an increasingly significant role in the World\u27s energy supply mix. In North America, many utility-scale wind turbines are approaching, or are beyond the half-way point of their originally anticipated lifespan. Accurate estimation of the times to failure of major turbine components can provide wind farm owners insight into how to optimize the life and value of their farm assets. This dissertation deals with fault detection and failure prognosis of critical wind turbine sub-assemblies, including generators, blades, and bearings based on data-driven approaches. The main aim of the data-driven methods is to utilize measurement data from the system and forecast the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of faulty components accurately and efficiently. The main contributions of this dissertation are in the application of ALTA lifetime analysis to help illustrate a possible relationship between varying loads and generators reliability, a wavelet-based Probability Density Function (PDF) to effectively detecting incipient wind turbine blade failure, an adaptive Bayesian algorithm for modeling the uncertainty inherent in the bearings RUL prediction horizon, and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for characterizing the bearing damage progression based on varying operating states to mimic a real condition in which wind turbines operate and to recognize that the damage progression is a function of the stress applied to each component using data from historical failures across three different Canadian wind farms