Quantitative Resilience of Generalized Integrators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to efficiently quantify how much a control system’s performance degrades after actuator malfunctions, using geometric insights to simplify complex optimization problems.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to compute quantitative resilience in control systems with multiple integrators, reducing complex problems to linear optimization.

Findings

Method efficiently computes resilience for systems with multiple integrators.

Application to spacecraft trajectory control demonstrates practical utility.

UAV example shows the method's effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

Abstract

To design critical systems engineers must be able to prove that their system can continue with its mission even after losing control authority over some of its actuators. Such a malfunction results in actuators producing possibly undesirable inputs over which the controller has real-time readings but no control. By definition, a system is resilient if it can still reach a target after a partial loss of control authority. However, after such a malfunction, a resilient system might be significantly slower to reach a target compared to its initial capabilities. To quantify this loss of performance we introduce the notion of quantitative resilience as the maximal ratio of the minimal times required to reach any target for the initial and malfunctioning systems. Naive computation of quantitative resilience directly from the definition is a complex task as it requires solving four nested, possibly nonlinear, optimization problems. The main technical contribution of this work is to provide an efficient method to compute quantitative resilience of control systems with multiple integrators and nonsymmetric input sets. Relying on control theory and on two novel geometric results we reduce the computation of quantitative resilience to a linear optimization problem. We illustrate our method on two numerical examples: a trajectory controller for low-thrust spacecrafts and a UAV with eight propellers.