Fault Adaptive Control of Overactuated Systems Using Prognostic Estimation

This paper examines the fault adaptive control problem for a generic class of incipient failure modes, which do not initially affect system stability, but will eventually cause a catastrophic failure to occur. This risk of catastrophic failure due a component fault mode is some monotonically increasing function of the load on the component.

Assuming that a probabilistic prognostic model is available to evaluate the risk of incipient fault modes growing into catastrophic failure conditions, then fundamentally the fault adaptive control problem is to adjust component loads to minimize risk of failure, while not overly degrading nominal performance. A methodology is proposed for posing this problem as a finite horizon constrained optimization, where constraints correspond to maximum risk of failure and maximum deviation from nominal performance.