Integrated Design of Fault Tolerant Networked Control Systems

A Matlab/Simulink Multi-agent Toolkit for Distributed Networked Fault Tolerant Control System

Design, Analysis and Real-time Implementation of Networked Predictive Control Systems

The performance of a networked control system (NCS) is affected directly and indirectly by time delays generated in network communication. This paper addresses these time delays, their effects on system performance and the measures taken in an NCS design. For a time delay that is random but less than one sampling interval T, we model the system as a time-invariant control system with constant time delay T. For a time delay that is random and greater than one sampling interval T, we consider the system as a control system with packet drop and model it as a jump linear control system. Based on the above models, we propose a systematic method to improve the control system quality of performance by choosing a proper sampling interval to reduce data transmission, optimally scheduling to minimise packet loss and optimising controller design in case of packet loss. The simulation results and lab experiments demonstrate that the design method results in high performance in networked real-time control system.

To improve the performance properties of heavy vehicles, i.e., to reduce the risk of rollovers, to improve passenger comfort and road holding, a reconfigurable fault-tolerant control design of the active suspensions and the active brake is performed. However, when a fault (loss in effectiveness) occurs at one of the suspension actuators a reconfiguration is needed in order to maintain the same performance level. The detection of the fault is based on a Fault Detection and Identification (FDI) filter, which is based on an observer design. The proposed reconfiguration scheme is based on an H∞ Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) method that uses the fault information as one of the scheduling variables. The LPV based control design and the operation of the control mechanism are demonstrated in a vehicle manoeuvre.

Coventional control schemes are developed under the assumption that the sensors and actuators are free from faults. However, the occurrence of faults will cause degradation in the closed-loop performance and also will have an impact on safety, productivity, and plant economy. In the present work, we have proposed a fault-tolerant control scheme (FTCS) by integrating a fault detection and identification (FDI) technique with conventional control. The principal component of our proposed FTCS is a compensation strategy (supervisory system) which uses the information provided by the FDI to appropriately modify the controller as well as the model used in FDI. This allows online application of the FTCS without causing significant degradation in the closed-loop performance due to the occurrences of biases in sensors and actuators or due to changes in unmeasured disturbance variables and due to moderate change in process parameters. Through stochastic simulation studies of a continuous stirred tank reactor process, we demonstrate that our proposed FTCS leads to significant improvement in the closed-loop performance in comparison to a conventional control scheme, especially as the fault magnitude increases. The proposed compensation scheme also allows identification of multiple faults that occur sequentially in time and is also found to be robust with respect to moderate plant−model mismatch.

In this paper, the controller synthesis problem for fault tolerant control systems (FTCS) with stochastic stability and H2 performance is studied. System faults of random nature are modelled by a Markov chain. Because the real system fault modes are not directly accessible in the context of FTCS, the controller is reconfigured based on the output of a fault detection and identification (FDI) process, which is modelled by another Markov chain. Then state feedback and output feedback control are developed to achieve the mean square stability (MSS) and the H2 performance for both continuous‐time and discrete‐time systems with model uncertainties. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In the modern industry, electro-hydraulic actuators (EHAs) have been applied to various applications for precise position pressure/ force control tasks. However, operating EHAs under sensor faults is one of the critical challenges for the control engineers. For its enormous nonlinear characteristics, sensor fault could lead the catastrophic failure to the overall system or even put human life in danger. Thus in this paper, a study on mathematical modeling and fault tolerant control (FTC) of a typical EHA for tracking control under sensor-fault conditions has been carried out. In the proposed FTC system, the extended Kalman-Bucy unknown input observer (EKBUIO) -based robust sensor fault detection and identification (FDI) module estimates the system states and the time domain fault information. Once a fault is detected, the controller feedback is switched from the faulty sensor to the estimated output from the EKBUIO owing to mask the sensor fault swiftly and retains the system stability. Additionally, considering the tracking accuracy of the EHA system, an efficient brain emotional learning based intelligent controller (BELBIC) is suggested as the main control unit. Effectiveness of the proposed FTC architecture has been investigated by experimenting on a test bed using an EHA in sensor failure conditions.

This paper describes a dual-loop control scheme for fault tolerant flight control system design. The dual-loop controller consists of an outer loop controller–so-called adaptive neural sliding mode control (ANSC) and an inner loop controller designed by using nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) technique. The merits of adaptive neural network and sliding mode control scheme are that 1) the ability of adaptive neural network control to deal with unstructured uncertainty and 2) the ability of sliding mode control to guarantee transient response. Using timescale separation principal, the aircraft dynamics can be decomposed into fast and slow dynamics and the decomposed dynamics are inversed for NDI controllers. For real-time pilot simulation, one-stage inverse dynamics is used and the pilot inputs are translated to roll, pitch and yaw rate commands. For cascade NDI, two-stage dynamic inversion is used. The stability analysis of the proposed controller is performed using Lyapunov theory. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme, numerical simulation is performed for six degree-of-freedom nonlinear aircraft model while a failure occurs in longitudinal control surface. Simulation results demonstrate that closedloop system has good performance while encountering lock-in-place, partial destruction and floating actuator failures. Nomenclature stick long δ , stick lat δ , stick dir δ = pilot inputs for longitudinal, lateral and directional command dir lon lat K K K , , = sticks and pedal gains ref p , ref q , ref r = reference model rate commands cmd z n , cmd y n = normal and lateral acceleration command

This paper proposes a fault tolerant control (FTC) scheme based on sliding mode control for multi-motor electric vehicles. A design method of a sliding mode tracking controller with control allocation is developed based on the information provide by fault detection and identification (FDI) mechanism. The vehicles states yaw rate and longitudinal velocity are simultaneously controlled to track their references. A particular attention is given to study the effect of non-perfect fault estimation. The control allocation explore the over actuated system in order to redistribute the control effort when a fault occurs. Simulations in various driving scenarios with different faults are carried out with a high-fidelity, CarSim, full-vehicle model. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed FTC approach.

Fault tolerance is becoming an essential feature in today’s Networked Control Systems (NCSs). The extra cost of redundancy is expected to be compensated by the reduced downtime. Especially in developing countries, large variations in duration of repair can greatly influence downtime. This paper studies the fault-tolerant aspect of an Ethernet-based NCS for pharmaceutical tablet production described in the literature. Markov models are used to calculate the steady state availability. A cost analysis is then conducted to relate availability, cost of downtime, inventory costs and cost of repair strategies. The techniques described in this paper are general and can be applied to different fault-tolerant NCSs.

Fault-tolerance is becoming an increasingly crucial aspect of the design of Networked Control Systems (NCSs) in order to mitigate system downtime. However, the introduction of fault-tolerance is typically associated with significant traffic overhead. In this paper, an optimization to an Ethernet-based network fabric fault-tolerant NCS is proposed. The proposed optimization halves the amount of overhead traffic necessary for fault-tolerance while maintaining the same level of robustness. Moreover, based on the same optimization methodology, an expanded model with two in-line cells is presented and subsequently tested. The expanded two-cell model is designed to provide controller-level in addition to fabric-level fault-tolerance. Simulations using OPNET followed the traffic analysis, and proved the models to be fully reliable in the case of a single failure at a time, for both the single-cell model and the expanded two-cell network.

Loss of control accounts for over 25% of aircraft accidents worldwide. This study presents a fault tolerant flight control strategy for increasing aircraft safety. The work has been undertaken within the Action Group on fault tolerant control (FTC) of the European GARTEUR programme, which develops collaborative efforts in Europe to create new FTC technologies that could significantly advance the goals of the aviation safety. After the fault detection and confirmation by the in-flight dedicated systems, a compensation loop is activated to ensure safe recovery. The design of the FTC loop is achieved without any changes in the nominal (and certificated) flight control system (FCS). The FTC scheme design is formulated as an H∞ strong stabilisation problem. Fault compensability is subsequently discussed and formulated as a trim-deficiency analysis problem. The proposed technique is implemented on the SIMONA flight simulator and evaluated through a pilot experiment. The tested scenario corresponds to the landing approach of a large transport aircraft (B747-100/200). The faulty situation is related to trimmable horizontal stabiliser (THS) failures. Piloted flight simulator experiments show that fault tolerance can be achieved under the condition that there exists sufficient remaining control authority.

The rapid growth in the size and complexity of modern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) imposes increasing demand for the embedded resources, especially the communication resources. As a result, resource-efficient CPS design has become an important issue. Towards the design of networked embedded control systems, a major branch of CPS, reliable and deterministic communication is able to achieve satisfactory control performance. However, the amount of this type of resource that can be provided by the embedded platform is often limited. On the other hand, it is difficult to guarantee the control performance with non-deterministic communication resources, due to their unpredictable behavior. In this paper, we propose a novel control scheme to efficiently utilize elastic communication resources. In general, the non-deterministic communication resources are flexibly deployed on top of the deterministic communication resources to achieve stability and good control performance. In the rare worst-case, when non-deterministic communication is completely unavailable, the deterministic communication resources are used to guarantee stability and the control performance satisfying the design requirement. The experimental results show that the performance of the control application is ensured to satisfy the design requirement in the worst case and that better control performance is achieved when non-deterministic resources are available.

In the design of Fault Tolerant Systems, some type of hardware redundancy is often used, Triple Modular Redundancy being one of the well known techniques of this type. Anyway, it must be taken into account that, after one of the copies of the implemented hardware fails, then it loses fault mitigation ability and continues in operation degraded to self-checking pair. In today's dependable systems fault mitigation techniques are combined with techniques for the system repair and recovery. In FPGA-based systems the recovery process can be implemented by Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration process. In this paper, previously developed Fault Tolerant CAN Bus Control system and the FPGA partial reconfiguration process are combined to achieve the control system self-repairing ability. The synchronization process of the recovered circuit copy with the rest of the system which was operating while the faulty component reconfiguration was performed, is described in the paper.

Many traditional fault tolerant flight control systems augment a baseline controller with an algorithm to detect and then isolate faults. Often, this entails estimating a new system dynamics model and automatic synthesis of new controller parameters. An alternate approach to fault tolerant control can be utilized if the basel ine controller is a direct adaptive control system. For failure modes that do not require control reconfiguration, this baseline adaptive controller demonstrates fault tolerance. This paper details the general formulation of a direct adaptive controller based on dynamic inversion with neural network adaptation. The implementation of this controller on several vehicles is also presented. In order to show the broad applicability of this approach, these vehicles are chosen from a wide range of categories, namely a tailless fighter, a reusable launch vehicle technology demonstrator, a helicopter, a ducted fan, and an acrobatic airplane. Results for nominal and fault cases for these vehicles are provided. Through this summary of fault tolerance results for each vehicle, direct adaptive control is shown to be well -suited to providing both nominal and fault tolerant control for vehicles from a wide range of categories.