Data-based Distributed Fault Diagnosis for Adaptive Structures using Convolutional Neural Networks

Adaptive structures are able to react to environmental impacts and have become a promising approach in civil engineering to improve the load-bearing behavior of buildings. Since reliability and safety of building structures are major concerns, the detection and isolation of faults are essential. In this work, the data-based distributed fault diagnosis of sensor and actuator faults in an adaptive high-rise truss structure is investigated and compared to a centralized approach. The decomposition of the different subsystems is given by the hardware layout of the different sensor systems and actuators. The mechanical structure is modeled and extended by dynamic sensor and actuator models containing different faults. Based on the simulation model, different fault scenarios are generated and used for training a convolutional neural network with dropout regularization. It is shown that the distributed approach needs less training data and yields better classification results than the centralized approach due to a significant reduction of the complexity and dimensionality.