IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL, VOL. 50, NO. 7, JULY 2005 1063
Fault Detection in a Mixed Setting
M. J. Khosrowjerdi, R. Nikoukhah, and N. Safari-Shad
Abstract—In this note, we study the problem of fault detection in linear
time-invariant (LTI) systems which are simultaneously effected by two
classes of unknown inputs: Noises having fixed spectral densities and
unknown finite energy disturbances. This problem is formulated as a
mixed filtering problem. Necessary and sufficient conditions
for local optimality are presented. Moreover, it is shown that suboptimal
solutionscanbecomputedbysolvingaconvexminimizationproblemwith
a set of linear matrix inequality (LMI) constrains. A numerical example
is given to illustrate the advantage of the mixed approach as
compared to existing techniques which are based on optimization of
and criteria.
Index Terms—Linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), mixed fil-
tering, robust fault detection.
I. INTRODUCTION
Safety and reliability are of paramount importance in control sys-
tems. To assure reasonable measures of safety and reliability, the need
for fault detection techniques have long been recognized; see [1] and
[2] for an extensive bibliography and review of the literature.
Typically fault detection schemes are concern with construction of
a dynamical system called a residual generator. This auxiliary system
takes the known input and output of a system and generates a signal
called the residual. This signal is then processed to decide whether or
not a fault has occurred in the system. Since systems are often subject
to unknown inputs, it is highly desirable to minimize their effect on the
residual generation. To do this without any apriori assumptions on the
unknown inputs requires perfect decoupling between the unknown in-
puts and the residual. This has been the focus of research in [3]–[6].
Alternatively, when unknown inputs are assumed to have fixed spectral
densities (bounded energy), the residual generation problem can be for-
mulated as an optimal filtering problem; see, e.g., [7]–[11].
It is well known that -norm cannot guarantee any reliable degree
of robustness. On the other hand, while the use of -norm in detec-
tion problems can reduce noise sensitivity, it can also lead to reduction
of sensitivity to faults; see [10] and [11].
In general, unknown inputs cannot be solely modeled by those which
have fixed spectral densities or those which have bounded energy. In
fact, in many situations, unknown inputs may include both types. This
view has been considered in [12] and [13] to develop a mixed
optimal filtering problem. Adopting this point of view in the context
of fault detection, we formulate a mixed residual generation
problem. The advantage of such an approach as will be shown in the
note is threefold: 1) By adjusting a single design parameter, it becomes
possible to trade off between detection performance and noise sensi-
tivity; 2) when this parameter is chosen sufficiently small, an almost
perfect decoupling residual generator is obtained which has been the
goal in, e.g., [3]–[6]; and 3) when this parameter is allowed to approach
infinity, the classical Kalman filtering is obtained.
Manuscript received April 16, 2004; revised January 31, 2005 and April 4,
2005. Recommended by Associate Editor Hong Wang.
M. J. Khosrowjerdi is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Sahand
University of Technology, Tabriz, Iran (e-mail: khosrowjerdi@sut.ac.ir).
R. Nikoukhah is with the INRIA, Rocquencourt BP 105, 78153 Le Chesnay
Cedex, France (e-mail: ramine.nikoukhah@inria.fr).
N. Safari-Shad is with the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, Platteville, WI
53818 USA (e-mail: safarisn@uwplatt.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAC.2005.851464
After restricting our class of residual generators to full-order
Kalman–Luenberger filters, a mixed minimization problem
is formulated where the optimal filter gain is sought via minimization
of a certain upper bound of the mixed cost. Using the
Lagrange multiplier formalism, two coupled Riccati equations are
derived as the necessary and sufficient conditions for filter gain local
optimality. However, the complexity of these conditions, and results
reported in [12] and [13], suggest considering a closely related convex
minimization problem with LMI constrains. This yields suboptimal
solutions which can be easily computed using powerful packages for
solving such problems, [14].
II. NOTATION
The notation used in this note is fairly standard. For a given matrix
, and denote its transpose and trace, respectively. If and
are symmetric matrices, (respectively, ) denotes
positive–semidefinite(respectively,positive–definite). denotes
the largest singular value of . Given real matrices , and
, we say that is the stabilizing solution of the algebraic
Riccati equation (ARE)
if is real, symmetric, and is Hurwitz. For simplicity of nota-
tion, a transfer matrix is represented in terms of state–space data
by . The space of real rational stable and proper
transfer matrices is denoted . The notations , and
denote, respectively, the , norms, and the space of square inte-
grable functions [16].
III. PROBLEM FORMULATION
We consider systems whose dynamics can be described by linear
time-invariant (LTI) systems
(1)
Here, is the state, and are the known input and
outputs. The unknown input is assumed to be a fixed spectral
density process/measurement noise while the unknown input
is assumed to be a finite energy disturbance modeling errors due to
exogenous signals, linearization or parameter uncertainties. Moreover,
the unknown input is a possible fault. With set to zero,
system (1) describes the normal mode, i.e., fault-free system. , ’s,
, and ’s are assumed to be known constant matrices of appropriate
dimensions. All the weighting functions reflecting the knowledge of
and are assumed to be absorbed into the system equations (1). Finally,
it is assumed that is a detectable pair and has full row rank.
As mentioned in the introduction, the objective of a fault detection
design is to construct the residual generator which takes and and
generates the residual signal to decide whether or not a fault has
occurred in the system . In this setup, the fault has occurred if some
norm of is larger than a prespecified threshold or there is a sudden
change in its statistical properties.
Remark 3.1: Note that the problem of fault location (isolation) can
also be addressed within this framework. Indeed, by labeling the spe-
cific fault to be located as and combining the remaining faults in
the unknown disturbance , a dedicated residual generator can be
designed.
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