Diagnosis and Fault-tolerant Control, 3rd Edition

Fault-tolerant control aims at a gradual shutdown response in automated systems when faults occur. It satisfies the industrial demand for enhanced availability and safety, in contrast to traditional reactions to faults, which bring about sudden shutdowns and loss of availability. The book presents effective model-based analysis and design methods for fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control. Architectural and structural models are used to analyse the propagation of the fault through the process, to test the fault detectability and to find the redundancies in the process that can be used to ensure fault tolerance. It also introduces design methods suitable for diagnostic systems and fault-tolerant controllers for continuous processes that are described by analytical models of discrete-event systems represented by automata. The book is suitable for engineering students, engineers in industry and researchers who wish to get an overview of the variety of approaches to process diagnosis and fault-tolerant control. The authors have extensive teaching experience with graduate and PhD students, as well as with industrial experts. Parts of this book have been used in courses for this audience. The authors give a comprehensive introduction to the main ideas of diagnosis and fault-tolerant control and present some of their most recent research achievements obtained together with their research groups in a close cooperatio n with European research projects. The third edition resulted from a major re-structuring and re-writing of the former edition, which has been used for a decade by numerous research groups. New material includes distributed diagnosis of continuous and discrete-event systems, methods for reconfigurability analysis, and extensions of the structural methods towards fault-tolerant control. The bibliographical notes at the end of all chapters have been up-dated. The chapters end with exercises to be used in lectures

Synthesis of reactive control protocols for switch electrical power systems for commercial application with safety specifications

This paper presents a method for the reactive synthesis of fault-tolerant optimal control protocols for a finite deterministic discrete event system subject to safety specifications. A Deterministic Finite State Machine (DFSM) and Behavior Tree (BT) were used to model the system. The synthesis procedure involves formulating the policy problem as a shortest path dynamic programming problem. The procedure evaluates all possible states when applied to the DFSM, or over all possible actions when applied to the BT. The resulting strategy minimizes the number of actions performed to meet operational objectives without violating safety conditions. The effectiveness of the procedure on DFSMs and BTs is demonstrated through three examples of switched electrical power systems for commercial application and analyzed using run-time complexity analysis. The results demonstrated that for large order system BTs provided a tractable model to synthesize an optimal control policy

Mobile Robot Lab Project to Introduce Engineering Students to Fault Diagnosis in Mechatronic Systems

This document is a self-archiving copy of the accepted version of the paper. Please find the final published version in IEEEXplore: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TE.2014.2358551This paper proposes lab work for learning fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) in mechatronic systems. These skills are important for engineering education because FDD is a key capability of competitive processes and products. The intended outcome of the lab work is that students become aware of the importance of faulty conditions and learn to design FDD strategies for a real system. To this end, the paper proposes a lab project where students are requested to develop a discrete event dynamic system (DEDS) diagnosis to cope with two faulty conditions in an autonomous mobile robot task. A sample solution is discussed for LEGO Mindstorms NXT robots with LabVIEW. This innovative practice is relevant to higher education engineering courses related to mechatronics, robotics, or DEDS. Results are also given of the application of this strategy as part of a postgraduate course on fault-tolerant mechatronic systems.This work was supported in part by the Spanish CICYT under Project DPI2011-22443

Reliability analysis of dynamic systems by translating temporal fault trees into Bayesian networks

Classical combinatorial fault trees can be used to assess combinations of failures but are unable to capture sequences of faults, which are important in complex dynamic systems. A number of proposed techniques extend fault tree analysis for dynamic systems. One of such technique, Pandora, introduces temporal gates to capture the sequencing of events and allows qualitative analysis of temporal fault trees. Pandora can be easily integrated in model-based design and analysis techniques. It is, therefore, useful to explore the possible avenues for quantitative analysis of Pandora temporal fault trees, and we identify Bayesian Networks as a possible framework for such analysis. We describe how Pandora fault trees can be translated to Bayesian Networks for dynamic dependability analysis and demonstrate the process on a simplified fuel system model. The conversion facilitates predictive reliability analysis of Pandora fault trees, but also opens the way for post-hoc diagnostic analysis of failures

Design of an integrated airframe/propulsion control system architecture

The design of an integrated airframe/propulsion control system architecture is described. The design is based on a prevalidation methodology that uses both reliability and performance. A detailed account is given for the testing associated with a subset of the architecture and concludes with general observations of applying the methodology to the architecture

Rapid Recovery for Systems with Scarce Faults

Our goal is to achieve a high degree of fault tolerance through the control of a safety critical systems. This reduces to solving a game between a malicious environment that injects failures and a controller who tries to establish a correct behavior. We suggest a new control objective for such systems that offers a better balance between complexity and precision: we seek systems that are k-resilient. In order to be k-resilient, a system needs to be able to rapidly recover from a small number, up to k, of local faults infinitely many times, provided that blocks of up to k faults are separated by short recovery periods in which no fault occurs. k-resilience is a simple but powerful abstraction from the precise distribution of local faults, but much more refined than the traditional objective to maximize the number of local faults. We argue why we believe this to be the right level of abstraction for safety critical systems when local faults are few and far between. We show that the computational complexity of constructing optimal control with respect to resilience is low and demonstrate the feasibility through an implementation and experimental results.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2012, arXiv:1210.202