Subsystem decomposition and state estimation of nonlinear processes with implicit time-scale multiplicity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel subsystem decomposition and distributed state estimation method for implicit two-time-scale nonlinear systems, leveraging separation of time scales to improve estimation accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a new approach combining subsystem decomposition with a composite solution and a distributed estimation scheme using EKF and MHE for different time scales.

Findings

Effective state estimation demonstrated on a chemical process simulation.

The method handles implicit time-scale multiplicity with unidirectional communication.

Simulation results confirm improved estimation performance.

Abstract

In this work, we propose a subsystem decomposition approach and a distributed estimation scheme for a class of implicit two-time-scale nonlinear systems. Taking the advantage of the two-time-scale separation, these processes are decomposed into smaller subsystems such as fast subsystem and slow subsystem. In the proposed method, an approach, composite solution, combines the approximate solutions obtained from both fast and slow subsystems. Based on the fast and slow subsystems, a distributed state estimation scheme is proposed to handle the implicit time-scale multiplicity. In the proposed design, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) is designed for the fast subsystem and a moving horizon estimator (MHE) is designed for the slow subsystem. There is a communication between the estimators: the slow subsystem is only required to send information to the fast subsystem one-directionally. The fast subsystem estimator does not send out any information. The estimators use different sampling of the state measurements, i.e., fast sampling of the fast state variables is considered in the fast EKF and slow sampling of the slow state variables is considered in the slow MHE. Extensive simulations based on a chemical process are performed to illustrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed subsystem decomposition and composite state estimation architecture.