Automated fault detection and accommodation: a learning systems approach

The detection, diagnosis, and accommodation of system failures or degradations are becoming increasingly more important in modern engineering problems. A system failure often causes changes in critical system parameters, or even, changes in the nonlinear dynamics of the system. This paper presents a general framework for constructing automated fault diagnosis and accommodation architectures using on-line approximators and adaptation/learning schemes. In this framework, neural network models constitute an important class of on-line approximators. Changes in the system dynamics are monitored by an on-line approximation model, which is used not only for detecting but also for accommodating failures. A systematic procedure for constructing nonlinear estimation algorithms is developed, and a stable learning scheme is derived using Lyapunov theory. Simulation studies are used to illustrate the results and to gain intuition into the selection of design parameters.>