Diagnosis of multiple sensor and actuator failures in automotive engines

Unlike cases where only a single failure occurs, fault detection and isolation of multiple sensor and actuator failures for engines are difficult to achieve because of the interactive effects of the failed components. If faults all appear either in sensors only or in actuators only, many existing residual generators which provide decoupled residual signals can be employed directly to obtain proper fault detection and isolation. However, when both sensor and actuator failures occur at the same time, their mutual effects on residuals make fault isolation particularly difficult. Under such circumstances, further decision logic is required. In the paper, the authors propose a hexadecimal decision table to relate all possible failure patterns to the residual code. The residual code is obtained through simple threshold testing of the residuals, which are the output of a general scheme of residual generators. The proposed diagnostic system incorporating the hexadecimal decision table has been successfully applied to automotive engine sensors and actuators in both simulation and experimental analyses. Enhancement of the present diagnostic performance by implementing an additional sensor is also described