Distributed fault detection observer for rail vehicle suspension systems

Due to the complexity of the LRVs system, centralized fault detection strategy faces challenges such as the the fault detection observer designfault isolation and its implementation on a real on-board system. It is very desirable to separate the fault detection task into several on-board condition monitoring system. In this paper, a distributed fault detection method is proposed. For each vehicle, one observer is designed and the observers are co-operated mainly by the state estimation errors. When there is a detectable fault, the observers send an alarm signal if the residual evaluation is larger than a predefined threshold. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by simulation results for the secondary vertical damper fault.