Fault-tolerant control has long been recognised as an important area of research and applications in control engineering practice. It has been developed in response to an increased demand for the reliability of the operation of control systems. This is particularly true for advanced process control, where complicated systems structures are seen in many industrial sectors such as material processing, power generation and networks management, car manufacturing and aviation systems, etc. Fault-tolerant control is also a subject of research and application that progresses in parallel to the fast development of many effective fault detection and diagnosis methodologies. Indeed, it can be concluded that fault detection, diagnosis and the resulting fault-tolerant control have become an integrated part of advanced process control systems. Such systems are generally controlled by a computer network known as the Distributed Control System (DCS), where information on the various stages of the process becomes available to process engineers and operators. It is therefore important to develop and apply new techniques that can make effective use of the plant-wide information so as to perform the required fault detection, diagnosis and fault-tolerant control.
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