Abstract

This thesis addresses the design of fault-tolerant controllers and a fault identification technique for bimodal piecewise affine systems. A new fault-tolerant control methodology is presented. Fault-tolerant, state feedback controllers are synthesized for piecewise-affine (PWA) systems while minimizing an upper bound on the expected value of a quadratic cost function. The controllers are designed to deal with partial loss of control authority in the closed loop PWA system. The proposed controller design technique stabilizes and satisfies performance bounds for both the nominal and faulty systems. Another contribution is the development of a fault identification technique for bimodal piecewise affine (PWA) systems. A Luenberger-based observer structure is applied to estimate partial loss of control authority in PWA systems. More specifically, the unknown value of the fault parameter is estimated by an observer equation obtained from a Lyapunov function. The design procedure is formulated as a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) and guarantees asymptotic stability of the estimation error, provided the norm of the input is upper and lower bounded by positive constants. The new PWA identification method is illustrated in a numerical example. Asa third contribution, an active fault-tolerant controller structure is proposed for bimodal PWA systems. The new active fault-tolerant controller structure is illustrated in a numerical example.