A Decoding Approach to Fault Tolerant Control of Linear Systems with Quantized Disturbance Input

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decoding-based fault tolerant control method for linear systems with quantized disturbances, utilizing information theory techniques for fault detection, identification, and recovery, demonstrated through flight control simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel decoding approach for fault detection in linear systems with quantized disturbances, integrating coding theory into control strategies.

Findings

Effective fault detection via recursive decoding algorithms

Successful application to flight control system simulations

Theoretical analysis supports practical implementation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to propose an alternative method to solve a Fault Tolerant Control problem. The model is a linear system affected by a disturbance term: this represents a large class of technological faulty processes. The goal is to make the system able to tolerate the undesired perturbation, i.e., to remove or at least reduce its negative effects; such a task is performed in three steps: the detection of the fault, its identification and the consequent process recovery. When the disturbance function is known to be \emph{quantized} over a finite number of levels, the detection can be successfully executed by a recursive \emph{decoding} algorithm, arising from Information and Coding Theory and suitably adapted to the control framework. This technique is analyzed and tested in a flight control issue; both theoretical considerations and simulations are reported.