| Abstract: | Mean time to failure (MTTF) is an important reliability index of fault‐tolerant control systems, which is chosen as a design objective in this paper. However, it is usually evaluated from stochastic reliability models, and no analytical expression is available to relate MTTF to controller parameters. To overcome this difficulty, a two‐stage design scheme is proposed in this paper: A gradient‐based search is firstly carried out on probabilistic H∞ performance characteristics for MTTF requirement; a sequential randomized algorithm with a weighted violation function is then developed for a controller design to satisfy the required H∞ performance, and its convergence is guaranteed with probability 1. Two iterative algorithms are carried out alternately to implement this scheme, and a controller can be designed for MTTF requirement. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
