Enhanced maritime safety through diagnosis and fault tolerant control

Faults in steering, navigation instruments or propulsion machinery are serious on a marine vessel since the consequence could be loss of maneuvering ability, and imply risk of damage to vessel, personnel or environment. Early diagnosis and accommodation of faults could enhance safety. Fault-tolerant control is a methodology to help prevent that faults develop into failure. The means include on-line fault diagnosis, automatic condition assessment and calculation of remedial action to avoid hazards. This paper gives an overview of methods to obtain fault-tolerance: fault diagnosis; analysis of properties of a faulty system; means to determine remedial actions. The paper illustrates the techniques by two marine examples, sensor fusion for automatic steering and control of the main engine. Copyright (C) 2001 IFAC.