Robust fault estimation of uncertain systems using an LMI-based approach

General recent techniques in fault detection and isolation (FDI) are based on H∞ optimization methods to address the issue of robustness in the presence of disturbances, uncertainties and modeling errors. Recently developed linear matrix inequality (LMI) optimization methods are currently used to design controllers and filters, which present several advantages over the Riccati equation-based design methods. This article presents an LMI formulation to design full-order and reduced-order robust H∞ FDI filters to estimate the faulty input signals in the presence of uncertainty and model errors. Several cases are examined for nominal and uncertain plants, which consider a weight function for the disturbance and a reference model for the faults. The FDI LMI synthesis conditions are obtained based on the bounded real lemma for the nominal case and on a sufficient extension for the uncertain case. The conditions for the existence of a feasible solution form a convex problem for the full-order filter, which may be solved via recently developed LMI optimization techniques. For the reduced-order FDI filter, the inequalities include a non-convex constraint, and an alternating projections method is presented to address this case. The examples presented in this paper compare the simulated results of a structural model for the nominal and uncertain cases and show that a degree of conservatism exists in the robust fault estimation; however, more reliable solutions are achieved than the nominal design. Copyright q 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.