A receding horizon set-theoretic approach oriented to predictive maintenance of actuators in linear systems

Predictive control presents an intrinsic capability to mitigate faulty events that can be achieved by properly defining operational constraints and/or running costs. Within this context this work presents a model predictive control (MPC) approach to deal with faults related to loss of actuators effectiveness. These undesired events occur when the associated degradation effects, whose evolution is assumed to be measurable and predictable, overcomes certain thresholds. The presented scheme consists of two modules: a prognostic device in charge of monitoring actuators health and a control reconfiguration unit whose action is based on actuators degradation information. The idea exploits a switching systems paradigm to formally model healthy and faulty plant configurations and to offline determine sequences of pre-computed inner approximations of one-step controllable sets. Such regions are then on-line selected by a switching logic to compute a proper control signal on the basis of the measured degradation level.