A Distributed Cyber-Physical Framework for Sensor Fault Diagnosis of Marine Internal Combustion Engines

This article proposes a distributed model-based methodology for the diagnosis of faults affecting multiple sensors used for condition monitoring and control of marine internal combustion engines (ICEs). To handle the complexity of the ICE, we consider it as a set of interconnected physical subsystems that constitute the physical layer. For every subsystem, the detection of sensor faults relies on the design of cyber agents, where every agent monitors one subsystem. To handle the heterogeneous dynamics of each subsystem in the fault detection decision-making process, each agent uses differential and algebraic residuals alongside adaptive bounds. For isolation purposes, a combinatorial decision logic is employed, realized in two cyber levels: the local and the global decision logic. The first aims at the recognition of all sensor fault patterns that might have affected the engine based on the local agent fault signatures and certain binary decision matrices. The latter is used to capture the propagation of sensor faults between the different monitoring agents. Simulation results are used to showcase the proposed methodology’s efficiency in tackling the problem and its applicability.