Reconfigurable control design with integration of a reference governor and reliability indicators

A new approach to manage actuator redundancy in the presence of faults is proposed based on reliability indicators and a reference governor. The aim is to preserve the health of the actuators and the availability of the system both in the nominal behavior and in the presence of actuator faults. The use of reference governor control allocation is a solution to distribute the control efforts among a redundant set of actuators. In a degraded situation, a reconfigured control allocation strategy is proposed based on on-line re-estimation of the actuator reliability. A benefit of incorporating reliability indicators into over-actuated control system design is the smart management of the redundant actuators and improvement of the system safety. Moreover, when the fault is severe, an adaptation approach using the reference governor is proposed. The reference governor unit is a reference-offset governor based on a discrete-time predictive control strategy. The idea is to modify the reference according to the system constraints, which become stricter after the occurrence of an actuator fault. The proposed approach is illustrated with a flight control application.