Fault tolerant control design for complex systems: Current advances and open research problems

Fault Tolerant Controls are highly reliable control systems aimed at increasing system reliability and reducing safety hazards. FTCs are designed to accommodate faults at their early stage of development to prevent those minor faults from developing into failures that might jeopardize system stability and availability. FTC design is a topic of active and ongoing research activities with applications spanning from aircraft systems to nuclear reactors, autonomous vehicles, power plants and underwater vehicles to name a few. This paper gives an overview of recent progress in theory and methods to design and analyze fault tolerant control systems. Strongpoint and shortcomings of each approach are briefly stated. Current research trends and practical implementations are discussed. Open problems related to the topic are also highlighted. The paper is written in a tutorial fashion to summarize some of the recent results in the subject area without going into details. One of the motivations of this paper is to provide some useful information to interested researchers in order to facilitate further developments in this challenging research problem.