Control reconfigurability of bilinear hydraulic drive systems

The objective of the methods within the framework of the plug and play process control and particularly fault tolerant control is to establish control techniques which guarantee a certain performance through control reconfiguration at the occurrence of the faults or changes. These methods cannot be effective if sufficient redundancy does not exist in the process. A measure for control reconfigurability which reveals the level of redundancy in connection with feedback control is proposed in this paper for bilinear systems. The proposed control reconfigurability measure is the extension of its gramian-based analogous counterpart, which has been previously proposed for the linear processes. The control reconfigurability is calculated for the bilinear models of an electro-hydraulic drive to show its relevance to redundant actuating capabilities in the models.