Reference model based maintenance of control system performance for industrial processes

In the last decade, fault tolerant controls (FTC) have enjoyed tremendous success to effectively accommodate defects in sensors, actuators, or plants. However, little of them considered what should be done once a control system performance is degraded during the operation. The aim of this paper is to maintain the performance of a control system at an acceptable level based on a pre-defined reference model. A maintenance approach is proposed and experimented in this paper. The method is to insert a compensator into the faulty control system and make the compensator and the faulty open loop system working together to track the pre-defined reference model. The proposed method is illustrated by reference to a mini process rig and shows the potential to industrial processes.