This paper proposes a robust fault detection and isolation (FDI) approach that combines active and passive robust FDI approaches. Standard active FDI approaches obtain robustness by using the unknown input observer (UIO) to decouple unknown inputs from residuals. Differently, standard passive FDI approaches achieve robustness by using the set theory to bound the effect of uncertain factors (disturbances and noises). In this paper, we combine the UIO-based and the set-based approaches to produce a mixed robust FDI, which can mitigate the disadvantages and exert the advantages of the two robust FDI approaches. In order to emphasize the role of set theory, the UIO design based on the set theory is named as the set-theoretic UIO (SUIO). A quadrotor subsystem is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed FDI approach.

Summary: This paper proposes to design an unknown input observer (UIO) for the linear‐parameter‐varying (LPV) system on the basis of the set theory, which is named as the set‐theoretic UIO (SUIO). The advantage of the SUIO consists in that it combines active and passive approaches to obtain robustness in state estimation (SE) and fault detection (FD). The active approach is based on the use of UIO to decouple unknown inputs, while the passive approach is based on the set theory to bound uncertain factors that cannot be actively decoupled. As a result, the effect of both unknown inputs (process disturbances, modeling errors, etc.) and measurement noises can be appropriately handled in the residual signals compared with the standard UIO‐based SE and FD approaches. The design of SUIO can overcome the limitations of the traditional UIO design conditions, which can significantly broaden the application of the UIO‐based SE and FD theory. Moreover, this paper proposes a generalized framework that can provide more flexibility in the design of SUIO guaranteeing their stability by means of a group of matrix inequalities. Because the LPV system uses a collection of online obtainable scheduling variables to embed nonlinearities, the design of SUIO for the LPV system can be used to address the SE and FD problems of nonlinear systems. At the end of this paper, two case studies are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper proposes a novel robust fault detection (FD) approach and designs a set-theoretic unknown input observer (SUIO) for linear parameter-varying (LPV) systems with both state and output equations scheduled by inexact scheduling variables. First, for such LPV systems, we propose a novel robust FD method by combing the set theory with the unknown input observer (UIO), which considers the bounds of measurement errors of scheduling variables to generate FDoriented sets. In general, as long as sensors with sufficiently high precision are equipped to measure the scheduling variables, the bounds of measurement errors of scheduling variables can be less conservative than those direct bounds of scheduling variables, which can reduce robust FD conservatism in this way. Second, we give the unknown input decoupling condition of SUIO for such LPV systems and propose an SUIO design method under this condition for robust state estimation (SE). Besides, stability conditions for the proposed methods are established via matrix inequalities. At the end of this paper, a case study is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

This letter proposes a novel online active fault diagnosis (AFD) method based on invariant sets for linear time-invariant (LTI) systems with bounded disturbances and noises. In general, the system has the healthy mode and several faulty modes. During system operation, with respect to the healthy and faulty modes, the corresponding healthy and faulty output estimation sets are computed, respectively. Thus, the task of AFD can be converted to separate the healthy and faulty output estimation sets, which can consequently distinguish the current system mode and implement AFD. The existing AFD methods implement the objective by designing an input sequence to separate the healthy and faulty output estimation sets. However, it is difficult to use these methods to simultaneously combine AFD and fault-tolerant control. Thus, we propose a new AFD method in this letter to online design inputs step by step, which has potential to overcome some weakness of the existing AFD methods. Particularly, we implement this AFD objective by online designing inputs at each step to maximize the distances of the healthy and faulty output estimation sets. Moreover, this online input design problem can finally be transformed into the resolution of two mixed integer programming (MIP) problems with a similar structure. At the end, a quadruple-tank benchmark system is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing with an existing set-based AFD method.