Fault Estimation and Networked Reconfiguration in Large-Scale Control Systems

This paper addresses the problem of fault-tolerant control in large-scale systems wherein the subsystems have to assure together a steady state control goal. It is considered that the faulty subsystem cannot be reconfigured locally and consequently, as a fault occurs, the command inputs of the fault-free systems have to be modified in order to guarantee the original control goal in the presence of fault as well. The proposed control strategy estimates the fault-induced modifications in the output of the faulty subsystem and, based on this information, recomputes the command inputs of the fault-free systems. To compensate the effect of the fault propagation through the physical interconnections, the local controllers of the subsystems are augmented with an external integral control loop. The stability and the networked implementation of the reconfiguration strategy are also treated. Simulation results are provided to show the applicability of the proposed fault-tolerant control strategy. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.