International Journal of Control, Vol.74, No.13, 1295-1310, 2001
Robust fault isolation for a class of non-linear input-output systems
The design and analysis of fault diagnosis methodologies for non-linear systems has received significant attention recently. This paper presents a robust fault isolation scheme for a class of non-linear systems with unstructured modelling uncertainty and partial state measurement. The proposed fault diagnosis architecture consists of a fault detection and approximation estimator and a bank of isolation estimators. Each isolation estimator corresponds to a particular type of fault in the fault class. A fault isolation decision scheme is presented with guaranteed performance. If at least one component of the output estimation error of a particular fault isolation estimator exceeds the corresponding adaptive threshold at some finite time, then the occurrence of that type of fault can be excluded. Fault isolation is achieved if this is valid for all but one isolation estimator. Based on the class of non-linear systems under consideration, fault isolability conditions are rigorously investigated, characterizing the class of non-linear faults that are isolable by the proposed scheme. Moreover, the non-conservativeness of the fault isolability conditions is illustrated by deriving a subclass of nonlinear systems and faults for which this condition is also necessary for fault isolability. A simulation example of a simple robotic system is used to show the effectiveness of the robust fault isolation methodology.