Diagnosis and Fault-tolerant Control for Ship Station Keeping

This paper adresses the design process of diagnosis and fault-tolerant control when the a system should operate despite multiple failures in sensors or actuators. Graph-teory based analysis of systems structure is demonstrated to be a unique design methodology that can cope with the diagnosis design for systems of high complexity, and also analyse the cases of cascaded or multiple faults. The paper takes as example a ship with two CP propellers, rudders and a bow thruster as actuators, and instrumentation with a suite of global position sensors, inertial navigation units and conventional gyro units to provide ship motion information. A salient feature of the design mehod is the ability to analyse cases where faults have occurrred and easily determine where in the faulty system diagnosability and controlability are retained.