Improving Diagnosability of Hybrid Systems through Active Diagnosis

Fault diagnosis is key to ensuring system safety through fault-adaptive control. This task is difficult in hybrid systems with combined continuous and discrete behaviors because mode changes make diagnosability hard to achieve. Including additional sensors can improve diagnosability, but that is not always feasible. An alternative strategy is active diagnosis, where we improve the diagnosis result by executing or blocking controllable events. We present a qualitative, event-based approach to active diagnosis of hybrid systems, where we automatically synthesize event-based diagnosers for hybrid systems that can determine if the system is diagnosable through passive or active diagnosis. We apply our active diagnosis scheme to a real-world electrical power distribution system.