Fault tolerant control of large complex systems

In large systems, every component provides a certain function and the overall system works satisfactorily only if all components provide the service they are designed for. Therefore, a fault in a single component usually changes the performance of the overall system. In order to avoid production deteriorations or damage to machines and humans, faults have to be found as quickly as possible and decisions that stop the propagation of their effects have to be made. A weak element in this framework are control loops. In fact automated systems are vulnerable to faults such as defects in sensors, in actuators and in controllers, which can cause undesired reactions and consequences as damage to technical parts of the plant, to personnel or to the environment. In this framework, the design of a Fault Tolerant control architecture is of crucial importance and solutions aiming at adapting the control strategy to the presence of the fault are needed in order to achieve prescribed performances also for the faulty system. This is usually achieved by providing the control loop with a decision making layer that analyzes the behavior of the plant and adapts the control strategy to hold the controlled system in a region of acceptable performance.

This full-day workshop aims at giving an overview of the recent research activity in the area of Fault Tolerant Control with a particular emphasis to large and complex control systems. In the morning, after a general introduction to the Fault Tolerant Control problem with some definitions and description of structural properties of fault tolerant systems, the workshop will focus on fault tolerant control architectures in the framework of distributed systems. In the afternoon some methods to design Fault Tolerant Control Systems based on different classes of models will be presented and illustrated. Nonlinear systems with uncertainties and discrete event systems (both deterministic and stochastic) will be considered and possible solutions to the FTC problem will be presented. Advanced applications will be also discussed.

Morning block:

1. The design of Fault Tolerant Systems: problem setting, structural properties, and a solution approach (90 min)
Presenter: Prof. Marcel Staroswiecki, Laboratoire d’Automatique et d’Informatique Industrielle de Lille, Ecole Polytechnique Universitaire de Lille, Université de Sciences et Technologies de Lille, France.

2. IFATIS Architecture for Fault Tolerant Control (45 min)
Presenters:
Prof. Michel Kinnaert, Depatrment of Control Engineering and System Analysis, Université Libre de Bruxelles (Free University of Brussels), Belgium and
Prof. Lorenzo Marconi, Center for Research on Complex Automated Systems (CASY), Department of electronics, computer science and systems (DEIS), University of Bologna, Italy
on the behalf of the IFATIS consortium (EU Project IST-2001-32122).

3. A Fault Tolerant Control architecture for distributed systems (45 min)
Presenter: Prof Thomas Parisini, Dept. of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering (DEEI), University of Trieste, Italy.

Afternoon block:

1. Fault tolerant control of uncertain systems applying the Youla-Jabr-Bongiorno-Kucera parameterization (25 min)
Presenter: Prof Jakob Stoustrup, Department of Control Engineering, Institute of Electronic Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Science, Aalborg University, Denmark.

2. Fault tolerant control of CD players (20 min)
Presenter: Prof Jakob Stoustrup

3. Fault tolerant supervision and supervisory control of safety critical systems: a discrete event system view (90 min)
Presenters:
Dr. Andrea Paoli, Center for Research on Complex Automated Systems (CASY), Department of electronics, computer science and systems (DEIS), University of Bologna, Italy and
Prof. N. Eva Wu, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering , Binghamton University, USA.

4. Robust Model Based Fault Detection and Identification with Applications (45 min)
Presenter: Prof. Jason L. Speyer, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA.