Fault identification and accommodation for incipient and abrupt faults

This paper proposes a fault tolerant control strategy for failures belonging to a class of functions including both incipient and abrupt faults. To this purpose a sliding mode controller has been designed ensuring the robust boundedness of system trajectories. The controlled system is proved to have a complete fault tolerance to such faults, being passive for soft faults and active for severe faults. Theoretical results have been validated by simulation.