Electrical Steering of Vehicles - Fault-tolerant Analysis and Design

The topic of this paper is systems that need be designed such that no single fault can cause failure at the overall level. A methodology is presented for analysis and design of fault-tolerant architectures, where diagnosis and autonomous reconfiguration can replace high cost triple redundancy solutions and still meet strict requirements to functional safety. The paper applies graph-based analysis of functional system structure to find a novel fault-tolerant architecture for an electrical steering where a dedicated AC-motor design and cheap voltage measurements ensure ability to detect all relevant faults. The paper shows how active control reconfiguration can accommodate all critical faults and the fault-tolerant abilities are demonstrated on a warehouse truck hardware.