Plug-and-play reconfiguration of decentralised controllers of interconnected systems

This paper proposes a new method for controller reconfiguration after a fault occurrence in a decentralised control system. If a fault affects a subsystem, only the corresponding control station should be reconfigured, although the fault has effect to other subsystems through the physical couplings. Therefore, a design agent which views the overall system from the perspective of the faulty subsystem is introduced in this paper. Based on available model information of the faulty subsystem and limited information of the physical interaction the design agent accomplishes the controller reconfiguration in order to fulfil local conditions to retrieve the overall system behaviour. This paper proposes the local conditions for reconfiguration and the assignment of model information to the design agent to result in a reconfiguration problem which can be solved locally. As a consequence, only the control station of the faulty subsystem needs to be reconfigured, is “plugged-in” the control hardware and “plays” together with the existing control stations. This idea of plug-and-play reconfiguration is illustrated by its application to a mutlizone furnace for crystal growth.