Control reconfiguration of dynamical systems. (Q2388363)

Control reconfiguration changes the control structure in response to a fault detected in the plant. This becomes necessary because a major fault breaks the corresponding control loop and therefore renders the whole system inoperable. Using a different set of actuators, it may still be possible to close the control loop via redundant signal paths. An important aim of control reconfiguration is to change the control structure as little as possible, since every change bears the potential of practical problems. The proposed solution is to keep the original controller in the loop, and to add an extension called ``virtual actuator'', that implements the necessary changes of the control structure. The virtual actuator translates between the signals of the nominal controller and the signals of the faulty plants. The manuscript defines several different reconfiguration goals, and it analyses their influence on the design of the virtual actuator. Depending on the precise formulation, the parameters result from an equivalent state-feedback control problem, a reference tracking problem or a disturbance decoupling problem. The structure of the virtual actuator does not change significantly for the different goals. Tests for the solvability of these problems are stated, which depend only on the structure of the system, and not on the specific parameter values. This approach is appropriate for the reconfiguration problem, since the faults considered here lead to a structural change of the system. Therefore, their impact on the system properties can be studied on a structural level. The manuscript concludes with several experimental results. The 3-Tank Benchmark Problem known from literature is used both as a running example to explain the approaches and as an experimental application for the reconfiguration after different faults. A two-degrees-of-freedom helicopter model is used as a further, more complicated application example.