MINIMISING FALSE ALARMS CAUSED BY COMMUNICATION DELAYS IN NETWORKED SYSTEMS

The design of control, estimation or diagnosis algorithms most often assumes that all available process variables represent the system state at the same instant of time. In actual networked systems, this is never true, because of unknown deterministic or stochastic transmission delays that are introduced by the communication network. When diagnosis is concerned, this will often generate false alarms. Indeed, even under nominal operation, the different transmission delays associated with the variables that appear in the computation form produce discrepancies of the residuals from zero. The paper proposes a technique aimed at the minimization of the resulting false alarms rate, that is based on the explicit modelling of communication delays and on their best-case estimation.