Discrete game abstraction for fault tolerant control synthesis

The focus of this paper is on the generation of controllers for fault tolerant control. Active off-line fault tolerant control design relies on a pool of controllers designed to handle different failure modes. Designing this pool of controllers remains a challenge and this paper hence investigates automatic control synthesis for a specific class of systems by abstracting the control problem to a set of combinatorial objects or a state machine. Next, a discrete game is formulated, in which the objective is to reach a goal set representing a desired (reference) state, and faults are treated as moves by a malignant opponent. Assuming that a winning strategy exists for this game, it forms a rule base that determines which control law to use under a given fault condition.