Journal of Control Science and Engineering 
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 265189, 10 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/265189
Research Article

Reliability Monitoring of Fault Tolerant Control Systems with Demonstration on an Aircraft Model

Hongbin Li,1 Qing Zhao,1 and Zhenyu Yang2

 1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton T6G 2V4, AB, Canada
2Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Aalborg University Esbjerg, Niels Bohrs Vej 8, Esbjerg 6700, Denmark
Received 4 April 2007; Revised 6 September 2007; Accepted 13 November 2007

Recommended by Kemin Zhou

Abstract

This paper proposes a reliability monitoring scheme for active fault tolerant control systems using a stochastic modeling method. The reliability index is defined based on system dynamical responses and a safety region; the plant and controller are assumed to have a multiple regime model structure, and a semi-Markov model is built for reliability evaluation based on the safety behavior of each regime model estimated by using Monte Carlo simulation. Moreover, the history data of fault detection and isolation decisions is used to update its transition characteristics and reliability model. This method provides an up-to-date reliability index as demonstrated on an aircraft model.