Development on Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Control Techniques with Applications to Safety-Critical Systems

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Reliability, safety, and availability (RSA) are broad, integrated and definitely core issues in human life. There are wide varieties of systems that their RSA are so critical to our lives. Electrical grids (from power generation to distribution), transportation systems (manned and unmanned aerial/ground/surface vehicles (UAVs/UGVs/USVs), etc.) are important examples of these safety-critical systems. One important question is that how reliable and resilient is our today's grid? The RSA of the power systems are being challenged, as the infrastructure ages and as new operating challenges emergeincluding the generation and integration of intermittent renewable energies like wind and solar. To address such challenges, the next-generation electricity grid, known as smart grid, will be a network of integrated microgrids that are geographically compact units capable of integrating local renewable energy generation. For such an interconnected network, the relevant components and units need to be controlled in a cooperative framework capable of providing power that is reliable, efficient, and environmentally responsible. In the other examples of safety-critical systems such as UAVs/UGVs/USVs, the necessity of RSA is even more immediate. From TV news, we hear about some natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanoes, forest fires, and nuclear reactor malfunctions. For these dangerous and uncertain environments, it is difficult or unsafe to deal with these disasters by personnel and manned systems. Therefore, unmanned systems (USs), including UAVs, UGVs and USVs, become useful and more and more popular. With the aid of a group of USs, we can complete certain difficult missions which cannot be completed with a single vehicle and impossible before. In this case, fault-tolerant cooperative control (FTCC) among the group of USs becomes necessary for practical applications since one or more USs may fail to operate during a mission due to possible system malfunctions, damages, communication failures. Considering the above-mentioned facts, one question arises naturally: how to guarantee the RSA requirements of the above-mentioned safety-critical systems? In fact, the most enabling technologies to guarantee the mentioned requirements include effective techniques for monitoring, fault diagnosis, and FTCC. Although the mentioned safety-critical systems belong to different disciplines ranging from aerospace, mechanical, and electrical systems, they are similar from control and condition monitoring viewpoint. The objective of this proposal is to develop advanced and practical techniques for providing possible solutions to the above-mentioned issues and applications with systematic theory and methodologies. In another words, the main task of this project is to develop new fault diagnosis and FTCC techniques to USs and smart grids in such cutting-edge research and development areas.