Fault-Tolerant Control of Multilayer Interconnected Nonlinear Systems: An Inclusion Principle Approach

This paper addresses the fault-tolerant control (FTC) issue for a class of multilayer interconnected nonlinear systems by using the inclusion principle. First, an overlapping decomposition method is proposed that expands the original interconnected system into a new one where each layer is not overlapped with each other. Second, for such an expanded system, the coupling effects among multiple layers are analyzed by using cyclic-small-gain theorem, and FTC schemes based on layer cooperation are further developed. Finally, the control designed for the expanded system is contracted back to the original interconnected system to achieve its FTC goal. An example of multiple pendulums is taken to illustrate the efficiency and applicability of the obtained theoretical results.