Fault Diagnosis with Static and Dynamic Observers

We study sensor minimization problems in the context of fault diagnosis. Fault diagnosis consists in synthesizing a diagnoser that observes a given plant and identifies faults in the plant as soon as possible after their occurrence. Existing literature on this problem has considered the case of fixed static observers, where the set of observable events is fixed and does not change during execution of the system. In this paper, we consider static observers where the set of observable events is not fixed, but needs to be optimized (e.g., minimized in size). We also consider dynamic observers, where the observer can "switch" sensors on or off, thus dynamically changing the set of events it wishes to observe. It is known that checking diagnosability (i.e., whether a given observer is capable of identifying faults) can be solved in polynomial time for static observers, and we show that the same is true for dynamic ones. On the other hand, minimizing the number of (static) observab...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: FUIN
• Authors: Franck Cassez, Stavros Tripakis
• Keywords: Dynamic Observers, FUIN 2008, Observable Events, Static Observers