Model-based fault tolerant control reconfiguration for discrete event systems

We describe a novel fault-tolerant approach for discrete-event systems by integrating sensor fusion within a diagnosis and control reconfiguration mechanism. This approach can automatically compute fault-tolerant control/reconfiguration actions which maintain pre-specified control objectives. Our underlying framework is based on model-based diagnostic representations and algorithms, and integrates diagnostics and control reconfiguration for discrete event systems using a single modeling mechanism and suite of algorithms. Given failures in the system, we describe a modeling approach that facilitates diagnostic isolation while performing sensor fusion to minimize false alarms, thereby increasing tolerance to sensor faults as well as (non-measurable) component faults. We show how we can explicitly trade off the false alarm rate with other system constraints.