Unambiguous fault identification and accommodation for incipient and abrupt faults

This paper considers a failure model including both incipient and abrupt faults, and addresses the problem of identifying and accommodating such faults. An identification strategy is proposed for the considered fault class, and a test is presented able to discriminate between the two types of failures. In order to prove the effectiveness of the estimation procedure a fault tolerant control strategy based on those theoretical results has been designed and implemented by simulation on a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft.