Resilience of Linear Systems to Partial Loss of Control Authority

Abstract

After a loss of control authority over thrusters of the Nauka module, the International Space Station lost attitude control for 45 minutes with potentially disastrous consequences. Motivated by this scenario, we investigate the continued capability of control systems to perform their task despite partial loss of authority over their actuators. We say that a system is resilient to such a malfunction if for any undesirable inputs and any target state there exists an admissible control driving the state to the target. Building on controllability conditions and differential games theory, we establish a necessary and sufficient condition for the resilience of linear systems. As their task might be time-constrained, ensuring completion alone is not sufficient. We also want to estimate how much slower the malfunctioning system is compared to its nominal performance. Relying on Lyapunov theory we derive analytical bounds on the reach times of the nominal and malfunctioning systems in order to quantify their resilience. We illustrate our work on the ADMIRE fighter jet model and on a temperature control system.