A Fault-Tolerant Sensor Reconciliation Scheme
based on Self-Tuning LPV Observers
Hamid Behzad
1
, Alessandro Casavola
2
, Francesco Tedesco
2
,
Mohammad Ali Sadrnia
1
and Gianfranco Gagliardi
2
1
Shahrood University of Technology, Iran
2
University of Calabria, DIMES, Italy
Keywords:
Sensor Reconciliation, Fault Estimation, LPV Luenberger Observer.
Abstract:
This paper presents a fault-tolerant sensor reconciliation scheme for systems equipped with a redundant num-
ber of possibly faulty ”physical” sensors. The reconciliator is in charge to discover on-line, at each time
instant, the faulty physical sensors, if any, and exclude their measures from the generation of the ”virtual”
sensors, which, on the contrary, are supposed to be always healthy and suitably usable for control purposes
without requiring the reconfiguration of the nominal control law. Amongst many, the solution proposed here
is based on the use of a Linear Parameter Varying Luenberger Observers (LPV-LU) able to estimate both
state, bias fault and loss of effectiveness fault. Such information is used to self adapting the parameters of the
LPV representation. For simplicity, the sensor faults here considered are limited to variation of sensors’ gain
and offset values. The scheme is fully described and all of its properties investigated and proved. Finally, a
simulation example is reported in details to show the effectiveness of the scheme.
1 INTRODUCTION
The capability of control systems to detect faulty sen-
sors and recover in turn uncorrupted data has progres-
sively gained more relevance in the last two decades.
Traditional control schemes are usually designed by
assuming perfect working conditions of the sensors
to be used. However, in practice, sensors are subject
to faults and, in that case, may provide wrong infor-
mation about the system state, possibly degrading the
system performance or even causing instability (Mer-
rill et al., 1988; Samara et al., 2008). Therefore,
Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) is an important area of
research in the safety critical systems domain.
One strategy to cope with this situation is to find
a controller that assigns to the reconfigured closed-
loop system a similar behaviour with respect to the
nominal closed-loop system. A different strategy re-
lies on the fault hiding approach that tries to hide the
fault to the controller. In the latter approach the nom-
inal controller remains in the loop while the reconfig-
uration block re-routes the output signals around the
faulty component (Lunze and Richter, 2008). Such
an approach has been dealt with in (Steffen, 2005)
where a virtual sensor strategy has been proposed for
fault accommodation purposes. The disadvantage of
that method is that it is assumed that the sensor faults
have already been detected and estimated correctly.
The virtual sensors contribution to Active Fault Toler-
ant Control (AFTC) has been investigated in (Ponsart
et al., 2010). There, the case of multiplicative sen-
sor faults has not received any consideration. The vir-
tual sensor approach has been investigated in (Behzad
et al., 2016), for Sensor Reconciliation(SR) purposes.
This paper aims at presenting a general SR method
for discrete-time linear systems with redundant phys-
ical sensors possibly subject to loss of effectiveness
(gain) and offset (bias) faults. To this end, the pro-
posed scheme consists of two interconnected mod-
ules: (i) a polytopic Luenberger Observer (LU) ((Bara
et al., 2001)) in charge of estimating the current gain
sensor faults, the state of the system and possible bias
fault occurrences; (ii) a sensor reconciliation unit used
to reconcile sensor measures. The key idea used in
the proposed scheme is to consider the current gain
and bias sensor faults with the system states, as an
auxiliary state and consequently to design a polytopic
LPV-UIO observer capable to estimate the faults via
a specific Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) procedure.
Differently from (Behzad et al., 2016), where the con-
Behzad, H., Casavola, A., Tedesco, F., Sadrnia, M. and Gagliardi, G.
A Fault-Tolerant Sensor Reconciliation Scheme based on Self-Tuning LPV Observers.
DOI: 10.5220/0006840501110118
In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO 2018) - Volume 1, pages 111-118
ISBN: 978-989-758-321-6
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
111