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U of M College of Engineering Control Seminar Series Sponsored by Eaton, Ford, General Motors, and Whirlpool |
Fault Tolerant Control of Large Complex
Systems
Dr. Andrea Paoli
University of Bologna, ITALY
Center for Research on Complex and Automated Systems
Department of Electronic, Computer Science and
Systems
Abstract:
In large systems, every component
provides a certain function and the overall system works satisfactorily only if
all components provide the service they are designed for. Therefore, a fault in
a single component usually changes the performance of the overall system. In
order to avoid production deteriorations or damage to machines and humans,
faults have to be found as quickly as possible and decisions that stop the
propagation of their effects have to be made.
A weak element in this framework
are control loops. In fact automated systems are vulnerable to faults such as
defects in sensors, in actuators and in controllers, which can cause undesired
reactions and consequences as damage to technical parts of the plant, to
personnel or to the environment. In this framework, the design of a Fault
Tolerant control architecture is of crucial importance and solutions aiming at adapting the
control strategy to the presence of
the fault are needed in order to achieve prescribed performances also
for the faulty system. This is usually achieved by providing the control loop
with a decision making layer that analyzes the behavior of the plant and adapts
the control strategy to hold the controlled system in a region of acceptable
performance.
After a general introduction to
the Fault Tolerant Control problem with some definitions and description of
structural properties of fault tolerant systems, the talk will focus on fault
tolerant control architectures in the framework of distributed systems,
summarizing some of the ideas and results obtained in the context of the
European Project IFATIS (proposal number IST-2001-32122).
3:30 – 4:30 p.m.