Control reconfigurability of bilinear systems

The objective of the methods within the framework of the plug-and-play process control, and particularly fault-tolerant control, is to establish control techniques that guarantee a certain performance through control reconfiguration at the occurrence of faults or changes. These methods cannot be effective without sufficient redundancy in the process. In this paper, a measure for control reconfigurability that reveals the level of redundancy in connection with feedback control is proposed for bilinear systems. The proposed control reconfigurability measure is the extension of its gramian-based analogous counterpart, which has been previously proposed for linear processes. First, the controllability and observability gramians for parameter-varying bilinear systems are introduced, and then the control reconfigurability measure is presented. This measure is calculated for the bilinear models of an electro-hydraulic drive to demonstrate its relevance to redundant actuating capabilities in the models.