Fault-Hiding Control Reconfiguration for a Class of Discrete Event Systems

Fault-hiding control reconfiguration aims at hiding a fault from the nominal controller while the reconfigured closed-loop system possesses admissible behaviour. The necessary degrees of freedom are created by placing a reconfiguration block between nominal controller and faulty plant. We aim at a guaranteed non-conflicting, complete and controllable behaviour of the self-reconfiguring closed-loop system, in particular for an arbitrary solution to the nominal control problem. Thereby, the nominal controller design and the design of the reconfiguration block are completely decoupled. This is desirable from a practical perspective, since in this way additional fault-tolerant control capabilities can be retrofit to an existing control system. In this paper, we propose a self-reconfiguring control architecture, state our reconfiguration problem in terms of finite languages and address the synthesis of discrete event dynamic reconfiguration blocks. To illustrate our results, we provide a running example.