A Multi-Agent Approach to Integrated FDI & Reconfiguration of Autonomous Systems

Abstract

This work is concerned with a new type of realtime reconfigurable control systems that is based on the use of autonomous agents. To this end, two stages have been examined in the context of intelligent agent decision making; the fault detection and identification (FDI) stage and the reconfiguration stage (RC). The FDI stage detects that a fault has occurred. It then further diagnoses the situation. The RC stage follows this by adapting or changing the control architecture to accommodate the fault. The problem is to synchronize or integrate these two stages in the overall structure of a control system on real world applications. The multi-agent architecture proposed in this paper has several advantages in terms of modularity, reliability, ability to learn and achieve overall higher robustness over past "single software" methods. Initial tests on an example system have been carried out to demonstrate this new organisation of reconfigurable control systems.

A Mission Based Fault Reconfiguration Framework for Spacecraft Applications

“…In this formulation, the weight on each control law depends upon the probability of the corresponding failure as predicted by the detection scheme. Also, Abu Bakar and Veres 2 have proposed a multi-agent fault tolerant planning architecture where the reconfiguration agent iterates on various reconfiguration actions while learning from iterations until the response of the system is satisfactory.…”