Active fault tolerant control of piecewise affine systems with reference tracking and input constraints

An active fault tolerant control (AFTC) method is proposed for discrete‐time piecewise affine (PWA) systems. Only actuator faults are considered. The AFTC framework contains a supervisory scheme, which selects a suitable controller in a set of controllers such that the stability and an acceptable performance of the faulty system are held. The design of the supervisory scheme is not considered here. The set of controllers is composed of a normal controller for the fault‐free case, an active fault detection and isolation controller for isolation and identification of the faults, and a set of passive fault tolerant controllers (PFTCs) modules designed to be robust against a set of actuator faults. In this research, the piecewise nonlinear model is approximated by a PWA system. The PFTCs are state feedback laws. Each one is robust against a fixed set of actuator faults and is able to track the reference signal while the control inputs are bounded. The PFTC problem is transformed into a feasibility problem of a set of LMIs. The method is applied on a large‐scale live‐stock ventilation model. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.