Observer-Based Fault-Tolerant Predictive Control for LPV Systems with Sensor Faults: An Active Car Suspension Application

In this paper, an observer-based robust fault-tolerant predictive control (ORFTPC) strategy is proposed for Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) systems subject to input constraints and sensor failures. The main objective of this work is to establish a real observer based on a virtual observer to be used to estimate both states and sensor failures of the system. The proposed virtual observer is employed to improve the observation precision and reduce the impacts of the sensor faults and the external disturbances in the LPV systems. In addition, a real observer is proposed to overcome the virtual observer margins and to ensure that all states and sensor faults of the system are properly estimated, without the need for any fault isolation modules. The proposed solution demonstrates that, using both observers, a robust fault-tolerant predictive control is established via the Lyapunov function. Moreover, sufficient stability conditions are derived using the Lyapunov approach for the convergence of the proposed robust controller. Furthermore, the proposed approach simultaneously computes the gains of the real observer and the controller from a linear matrix inequality (LMI), which is deduced from the estimation errors. Finally, the performance of the proposed approach is investigated by a simulation example of a quarter-vehicle model, and the simulation results under a sensor fault illustrate the robustness and performance of the proposed method.

A Redundancy Metric Set within Possibility Theory for Multi-Sensor Systems

In intelligent technical multi-sensor systems, information is often at least partly redundant—either by design or inherently due to the dynamic processes of the observed system. If sensors are known to be redundant, (i) information processing can be engineered to be more robust against sensor failures, (ii) failures themselves can be detected more easily, and (iii) computational costs can be reduced. This contribution proposes a metric which quantifies the degree of redundancy between sensors. It is set within the possibility theory. Information coming from sensors in technical and cyber–physical systems are often imprecise, incomplete, biased, or affected by noise. Relations between information of sensors are often only spurious. In short, sensors are not fully reliable. The proposed metric adopts the ability of possibility theory to model incompleteness and imprecision exceptionally well. The focus is on avoiding the detection of spurious redundancy. This article defines redundancy in the context of possibilistic information, specifies requirements towards a redundancy metric, details the information processing, and evaluates the metric qualitatively on information coming from three technical datasets.