Dynamic Thresholds for a Reliable Diagnosis of Switched Systems

Safety, availability and reliability are the main concern of many industries. Thus, fault detection and isolation of industrial machines, which are in most cases switched systems, is a primary task in many companies. The presented paper proposes a new diagnostic approach for switched systems using two powerful tools: bond graph and observer. A diagnostic layer detects model errors using bond graph, and a smart algorithm identifies and locates faults using observer. Although observers serve as fault detectors, they also have their own errors caused by convergence delay of calculations; even in the case of no sensor defect, the residue does not converge to zero. In this paper, we propose a new method to solve this problem by integrating dynamic thresholds in the detection procedure, which helped to avoid false alarms and ensure a highly reliable diagnosis.