Fault detection and accommodation of a class of nonlinear systems with unknown multiple time-delayed faults

This paper investigates a fault detection and accommodation (FDA) problem of a class of nonlinear time-delay systems in the presence of unknown multiple time-delayed faults. Compared with existing literature, a main contribution of this paper is to design a time-delay independent FDA scheme, namely, the exact information on time delays is not required to implement the proposed FDA scheme. Under the assumption that the magnitude and occurrence time of multiple faults are unknown, we first design a delay-independent fault detection scheme with a detection threshold for time-delay systems and analyze the fault detectability. Then, an approximation-based fault accommodation design activated after the detection of the first fault is presented for compensating multiple faults. The robustness of the fault detection scheme and asymptotic stability of the tracking error are established through Lyapunov stability analysis. A simulation example is used to illustrate the proposed FDA scheme.