Distributed fault detection and accommodation with partial communication

In the recent years there has been an increased interest in the analysis and design of distributed control systems. This is motivated by the distributed nature of many systems, found in diverse areas such as manufacturing, transportation, power systems, mobile robotics, etc. Moreover, a key objective in engineering is the design of reliable systems that are able to operate within certain performance margins even in the presence of slowly developing faults. A distributed fault diagnosis and accommodation scheme needs to be able to provide reliable and safe operation of the distributed system, with limited information exchange between the individual subsystems. Towards this direction, this paper presents a distributed fault detection and accommodation design for a class of nonlinear interconnected subsystems. A fault may occur in the subsystems local dynamics as well as in the interconnections between the subsystems. The subsystems are allowed to exchange state information, according to a tracking error-based communication protocol. The distributed fault detection and accommodation architecture is based on the use of adaptive approximation models which utilize local, as well as, remote communicated state information.