RELIABLE CONTROL OF LARGE SCALE FLEXIBLE STRUCTURES

The paper presents a systematic scalable methodology for the reliable control design of large flexible structures. Reliability against controller failure is considered. The failure-mode of the controller means its total disconnection from the plant. 1–out–2 reliability structure is considered within two interconnected subsystems as a prototype case. This case can be directly generalized on more complex reliability structures and any low–authority control algorithm. Centralized, reliable decentralized, and reliable overlapping active control strategies are proposed using parallel redundancy of controllers and linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control design. Two different scenarios for the reliable control design are proposed including the performance issues. An example of the seismically excited cable–stayed bridge benchmark shows how to apply the proposed methodology.