Structural detectability analysis of a distributed sensor fault diagnosis scheme for a class of nonlinear systems

The objective of this work is to analyze the performance of the local monitoring modules of a distributed diagnosis scheme tailored to detect multiple sensor faults in a class of nonlinear systems. The local modules monitor the healthy operation of subsets of sensors (local sensor sets). Every module is designed to detect the occurrence of faults in the local sensor sets when some analytical redundancy relations (ARRs) are violated. The set of ARRs is formulated using structured residuals and adaptive thresholds based on a nonlinear observer. In order to characterize the sensitivity of every monitoring module to local sensor faults, we obtain structural fault detectability conditions based on adaptive thresholds, and strong fault detectability conditions based on ultimate robust positively invariant sets. These conditions correspond to explicit relationships between the local sensor faults, the worst-case bounds on modeling uncertainties and the design parameters of the local monitoring module.