Evidence management for compliance of critical systems with safety standards: A survey on the state of practice

ContextDemonstrating compliance of critical systems with safety standards involves providing convincing evidence that the requirements of a standard are adequately met. For large systems, practitioners need to be able to effectively collect, structure, and assess substantial quantities of evidence.ObjectiveThis paper aims to provide insights into how practitioners deal with safety evidence management for critical computer-based systems. The information currently available about how this activity is performed in the industry is very limited.MethodWe conducted a survey to determine practitioners’ perspectives and practices on safety evidence management. A total of 52 practitioners from 15 countries and 11 application domains responded to the survey. The respondents indicated the types of information used as safety evidence, how evidence is structured and assessed, how evidence evolution is addressed, and what challenges are faced in relation to provision of safety evidence.ResultsOur results indicate that (1) V&V artefacts, requirements specifications, and design specifications are the most frequently used safety evidence types, (2) evidence completeness checking and impact analysis are mostly performed manually at the moment, (3) text-based techniques are used more frequently than graphical notations for evidence structuring, (4) checklists and expert judgement are frequently used for evidence assessment, and (5) significant research effort has been spent on techniques that have seen little adoption in the industry. The main contributions of the survey are to provide an overall and up-to-date understanding of how the industry addresses safety evidence management, and to identify gaps in the state of the art.ConclusionWe conclude that (1) V&V plays a major role in safety assurance, (2) the industry will clearly benefit from more tool support for collecting and manipulating safety evidence, and (3) future research on safety evidence management needs to place more emphasis on industrial applications.     

A generalized control framework of assistive controllers and its application to lower limb exoskeletons

Various control methods have been studied for the natural assistance of human motions by exoskeletal robots, i.e., wearable robots for assisting the human motions. For example, impedance control and compliance control are widely used for controlling interaction forces between a human and a robot. When an accurate measurement of the human muscular force is available (e.g., electromyography), a direct use of the estimated human joint torque is possible in the control of an assistive robot. The human motions in a daily living, however, are so complex that they are constituted by multiple phases, such as walking, sitting, and standing, where the walking can be further categorized into multiple sub-phases. Therefore, a single control method cannot be the best option for all the motion phases; a switch in the control algorithms may be necessary for assisting human movements in multiple motion phases. In this paper, a generalized control framework is proposed to incorporate the various assistive control methods in one general controller structure, which consists of Feedforward Disturbance Compensation Control, Reference Tracking Feedback Control, Reference Tracking Feedforward Control, Model-based Torque Control. The proposed control framework is designed taking into consideration of the linearity of each control algorithm, and thus it enables the continuous and smooth switching of assistive control algorithms, and makes it possible to analyze the stability of the overall control loop. The proposed method is implemented into a lower-limb exoskeleton robot and is verified by experimental results.     

Extended state observer for uncertain lower triangular nonlinear systems

The extended state observer (ESO) is a key part of the active disturbance rejection control approach, a new control strategy in dealing with large uncertainty. In this paper, a nonlinear ESO is designed for a kind of lower triangular nonlinear systems with large uncertainty. The uncertainty may come from unmodeled system dynamics and external disturbance. We first investigate a nonlinear ESO with high constant gain and present a practical convergence. Two types of ESO are constructed with explicit error estimations. Secondly, a time varying gain ESO is proposed for reducing peaking value near the initial time caused by constant high gain approach. The numerical simulations are presented to show visually the peaking value reduction. The mechanism of peaking value reduction by time varying gain approach is analyzed.     

Attitude estimation using high-grade gyroscopes

This paper addresses the problem of attitude estimation using the angular velocity of Earth as a reference vector. A nonlinear observer is proposed that evolves on the special orthogonal group and is aided by angular velocity readings containing implicit measurements of the Earth’s spin. Additionally, the observer resorts to body-fixed measurements of one constant inertial reference vector. The observer’s sole tuning parameter, shaped as a matrix gain, is computed from a time-varying Kalman filter strategically applied to a uniformly observable linear time-invariant system, which is obtained from the linearized rotation matrix error dynamics. The nonlinear observer is proved to be locally exponentially stable but, most noticeably, in spite of this local-based inception, a Monte Carlo simulation analysis demonstrates the good properties of the observer in terms of convergence rate, tuning capability, and large basin of attraction. Furthermore, extensive experimental results confirm the properties of the proposed technique and validate its usage in real world applications.     

Boundary control and estimation of reaction–diffusion equations on the sphere under revolution symmetry conditions

ABSTRACT

Recently, the problem of designing boundary controllers and observers for unstable linear constant-coefficient reaction–diffusion equation on N-balls has been solved by means of the backstepping method. However, the extension of these results to spatially varying coefficients is far from trivial. This work deals with radially varying reaction coefficients under revolution symmetry conditions on a sphere (the three-dimensional case). Under these conditions, the equations become singular in the radius. When applying the backstepping method, a similar type of singularity appears in the backstepping control and observer kernel equations. However, with a simple scaling transformation, we are able to reduce the singular equation to a regular equation, which turns out to be the same kernel equations appearing when using the one-dimensional backstepping method. In addition, the scaling transformation allows us to prove stability in the H ¹ space.     

Anti-disturbance backstepping control for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles based on extended state observer

In this paper, we propose an anti-disturbance backstepping control approach with extended state observer (ESO) for tracking control of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles. Considering the large uncertainties, the external disturbances, and especially the lack of aerodynamic knowledge, several ESOs are introduced in the backstepping controller. With the total disturbance estimation ability of ESOs, almost no aerodynamic knowledge is needed for the controller design. Meanwhile, ESOs are also used to estimate the derivatives of the virtual control signals. The problem of “explosion of terms” is avoided. A key strategy of the controller is that each step of backstepping is activated successively. Consequently, the closed-loop system has time-scale structure. Rigorous stability proof can be obtained. At last, compared simulation results verify the superior tracking performance of the proposed controller.     

High gain observer for a class of nonlinear systems with coupled structure and sampled output measurements: application to a quadrotor

This paper proposes a new high gain observer for a class of non-uniformly observable nonlinear systems with coupled structure driven by sampled outputs. The considered class of systems is particularly constituted by several subsystems where each subsystem is associated to a subset of the output variables. The observer design is carried out through two steps. First, a high-gain observer is proposed in the continuous-time output case under the assumption that an adequate persistent excitation condition is satisfied by each subsystem. Then, the proposed observer is redesigned to handle the case of sampled outputs leading thereby to a continuous-discrete time observer. The latter property is achieved thanks to the approach pursued along the convergence analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed observer is emphasised in a realistic simulation framework involving a mathematical model of a quadrotor which is diffeomorphic to the proposed class of considered systems.     

Observer-based prescribed performance attitude control for flexible spacecraft with actuator saturation

This paper investigates the prescribed performance attitude control problem for flexible spacecraft subject to external disturbances and actuator constraints. By using a new performance function and an error transformation, the attitude control system is transformed into an error system which will be kept bounded to ensure expected dynamic and steady-state responses. Compared with the commonly used performance function, the modified one has an explicit prespecified terminal time which determines the maximum convergence time of the attitude control system. A modal observer and a disturbance observer are designed to deal with the flexible vibration and disturbances, respectively. Furthermore, when considering actuator saturation, an improved control strategy is developed with an auxiliary system utilized to compensate the saturation. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed by Lyapunov theory. Simulation results show the effectiveness and performance of the proposed methods.     

New variable gain super-twisting sliding mode observer for sensorless vector control of nonsinusoidal back-EMF PMSM

This paper presents a new discrete-time super-twisting sliding mode observer with variable gains for sensorless nonsinusoidal vector control of permanent magnet synchronous motors. This observer is adopted to estimate the back electromotive forces (back-EMF) that are required for the rotor speed estimation and for the nonsinusoidal vector control. In addition, their gains are time-varying to minimize the chattering. So, they are adjusted based on internal states of the super-twisting algorithm. The stability analysis is investigated from the Lyapunov theory for discrete-time systems. Finally, simulation and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the good performance and the effectiveness of the proposed observer.