Decentralized fault diagnosis approach without a global model for fault diagnosis of discrete event systems

Diagnosability property ensures that a predefined set of faults are diagnosable by a centralized diagnoser built using a global model of the system, while co-diagnosability guarantees that these faults are diagnosed in decentralized manner using a set of local diagnosers. A fault must be diagnosed by at least one local diagnoser by using its proper local observation of the system. The aim of using decentralized diagnosis approaches is to overcome the space complexity and weak robustness of centralized diagnosis approaches while at the same time preserving the diagnostic capability of a centralized diagnosis. However, co-diagnosability property is stronger than diagnosability property. If a system is co-diagnosable, then it is diagnosable, while a diagnosable system does not ensure that it is co-diagnosable. Therefore, the challenge of decentralized diagnosis approaches is to perform local diagnosis and to verify that it is equivalent to the centralized one without the need for a global model. In this paper, an approach is proposed to obtain co-diagnosable decentralized diagnosis structure of discrete event systems without the use of a global model. This approach is based on the synchronization of local diagnosis decisions in order to solve the ambiguity between local diagnosers. This synchronization allows obtaining local diagnosis equivalent to the global one without the use of a global model.     

A clustering-based approach for the identification of a class of temporally switched linear systems

The behaviours of hybrid dynamic systems (HDS) are determined by combining continuous variables with discrete switching logic. The identification of a HDS aims to find an accurate model of the system’s dynamics based on its past inputs and outputs. In pattern recognition (PR) methods, each mode is represented by a set of similar patterns that form restricted regions in the feature space. These sets of patterns are called classes. A pattern is a vector built from past inputs and outputs. HDS identification is a challenging problem since it involves the estimation of different sets of parameters without knowing in advance which sections of the measured data correspond to the different modes of the system. Therefore, HDS identification can be achieved by combining two steps: clustering and parameter estimation. In the clustering step, the number of discrete modes (i.e., the classes that input-output data points belong) is estimated. The parameter estimation step finds the parameters of the models that govern the continuous dynamics in each mode. In this paper, an unsupervised PR method is proposed to achieve the clustering step of the identification of temporally switched linear HDS. The determination of the number of modes does not require prior information about the modes or their number.     

Generation of candidates' tree for the fault diagnosis of discrete event systems

This paper presents a discrete event model-based approach for Fault Detection and Isolation of manufacturing systems. This approach considers a system as a set of independent Plant Elements (PEs). Each PE is composed of a set of interrelated Parts of Plant (PoPs) modeled by a Moore automaton. Each PoP model is only aware of its local behavior. The degraded and faulty behaviors are added to each PoP model in order to obtain extended PoP ones. An extrapolation of Gaussian learning is realized to obtain acceptable temporal intervals between the time occurrences of correlated events. Finally based on the PoP extended models and the links between them, a fault candidates' tree is established for each plant element. This candidates' tree corresponds to a local on-line fault event occurrence observer, called diagnoser. Thus, the diagnosis decision is distributed on each plant element. An application example is used to illustrate the approach.