Increasing the safety & reliability of manufacturing systems against faults/failures: examples from the metal industry
Résumé
In highly automated industrial systems where maintenance or repair cannot be carried-out immediately, it is crucial to design control systems capable of ensuring nominal performance when taking into account the occurrence of such faults; this control is referred to as fault-tolerant control (FTC). The design of an FTC system requires quick but effective fault detection and isolation (FDI) for adequate decision making. The objective of an FTC is to maintain the current performance of the manufacturing system close the desired one and preserve its stability conditions in the presence of component and/or instrument faults; in some circumstances a reduced performances may be acceptable as a trade-off leading to a ‘sub-optimal' outcome. The main contribution of this current study emphasises on the practical applications of such strategies in the Metal industry in order to preserve the safety of operators and the reliability of processes