Reconfigurable Control of a Ship Propulsion Plant

Fault-tolerant control combines fault detection and isolation techniques with supervisory control, to achieve the autonomous accommodation of faults before they develop into failures. While fault detection and isolation (FDI) methods have matured during the past decade, the extension to fault-tolerant control is a fairly new area. Thise paper presents a ship propulsion system as a benchmark that should be useful as a platform for the development of new ideas and a comparison of methods. The benchmark has two main elements. One is the development of efficient FDI algorithms, and the other is the analysis and implementation of autonomous fault accommodation. A benchmark kit can be obtained from the authors