Reliability of fault tolerant control systems: Part II

For Part I see ibid. 40th IEEE Conf. Proceedings on Decision and Control (2001). Reliability properties peculiar to fault-tolerant control systems are emphasized. The paper proposes to formulate the fault tolerant control problem as an optimization problem that maximizes coverage of failures through redundancy management. Coverage modeling is attempted in a way that captures its dependence on the control performance and on the diagnostic resolution. Under the proposed redundancy management policy, it is shown that an enhanced overall system reliability can be achieved with a control law of a superior robustness, with an estimator of a higher resolution, and with a control performance requirement of a lesser stringency