Fault-Tolerant Control of Process Systems

Abstract

Safety and reliability are primary goals in the operation of industrial chemical plants. An important national need currently exists for enhancing the safety and reliability of chemical plants in ways that reduce their vulnerability to serious failures. Increasingly faced with the requirements of operational flexibility under tight performance specifications and other economic drivers, plant operation is relying extensively on highly automated process control systems. Automation, however, tends to increase vulnerability of the plant to faults, such as defects/malfunctions in process equipment, sensors and actuators, failures in the controllers or in the control loops, which, if not appropriately handled in the control system design, can potentially cause a host of undesired economic, environmental, and safety problems that seriously degrade the operating efficiency of the plant. These considerations provide a strong motivation for the development of systematic methods and strategies for the design of fault–tolerant control systems and have motivated many research studies in this area (see, for example, [26, 287, 295] and [38, 182, 218] for references).