Sensor and actuator placement with dependability constraints and a cost criterion

Blaise Conrard (1) , Vincent Cocquempot (1) , Mireille Bayart

1 STF - Systèmes Tolérants aux Fautes

This paper deals with the design of control systems. A method to optimize the instrumentation is presented and uses financial cost and dependability as criteria. This method is based on a structural model that describes qualitatively the different relations that link the physical variables. By analyzing this model, it is possible to obtain the different ways to estimate the unknown variables in function of the measurements provided by the sensors. The fault tolerant level is used to specify the dependability and to fix the number of failures that can induce the unavailability of the control system. Fixing this number for a given variable corresponds to the required number of different ways that allows its estimation in the structural model. In this context, the optimization consists in finding the instrumentation that satisfies the fault tolerant level constraints with the lowest financial cost. The two main contributions of this paper are first a clear formalization of the optimization problem that takes into account the costs of devices and specified fault tolerant level and second an extension of the structural model in order to take into account different operating modes and their specific features.

Blaise Conrard, Vincent Cocquempot, Mireille Bayart. Sensor and actuator placement with dependability constraints and a cost criterion. IFAC Safeprocess 2009, Jun 2009, Barcelone, Spain. pp.CDROM. ⟨hal-00710978⟩