Performance-Based Hierarchical Fault-Tolerant Control for Closed-Loop Systems With Multiplicative Faults: A Data-Driven Design Method

Fault-tolerant control (FTC) is vital for the safety and reliability of automatic systems. Most of the existing FTC methods are developed for open-loop systems subject to additive faults, regardless of the widely present control loops and multiplicative faults within systems. In this article, a performance-based FTC strategy is proposed for the closed-loop systems with multiplicative faults. Considering the high efforts in modeling complex systems, the proposed FTC strategy is realized in the data-driven context. Specifically, a nominal feedback-feedforward controller is first established for the fault-free systems. By selecting the system stability and reference tracking behavior as the key performance indices, two performance evaluators are constructed to detect and classify the occurred multiplicative faults based on the fault-induced effects on the system performance. Then, with the aid of the coprime factorization technique, the multiplicative faults, in the form of additive perturbations to the system coprime factors, are estimated utilizing the closed-loop process data. Furthermore, based on the fault knowledge, a hierarchical fault-tolerant tracking controller is developed according to the levels of system performance degradations, where the functional controller parameters are reconfigured with different priorities. Finally, case studies are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.