Distributed fault diagnosis for continuous-time nonlinear systems: The input–output case

In this paper, some new results on distributed fault diagnosis of continuous-time nonlinear systems with partial state measurements are proposed. By exploiting an overlapping decomposition framework, the dynamics of a nonlinear uncertain large-scale dynamical system is described as the interconnections of several subsystems. Each subsystem is monitored by a Local Fault Diagnoser: a set of local estimators, based on the nominal local dynamic model and on an adaptive approximation of the interconnection and of the fault function, allows to derive a local fault decision. A consensus-based protocol is used in order to improve the detectability and the isolability of faults affecting variables shared among different subsystems because of the overlapping decomposition. A sufficient condition ensuring the convergence of the estimation errors is derived. Finally, possibly non-conservative time-varying threshold functions guaranteeing no false-positive alarms and theoretical results dealing with detectability and isolability sufficient conditions are presented.