A Fault-Tolerant and Reconfigurable Control Framework: Modeling, Design, and Synthesis

Manufacturing systems (MS) have become increasingly complex due to constraints induced by a changing environment, such as flexibility, availability, competition, and key performance indicators. This change has led to a need for flexible systems capable of adapting to production changes while meeting productivity and quality criteria and reducing the risk of failures. This paper provides a methodology for designing reconfigurable and fault-tolerant control for implementation in a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC). The main contribution of this methodology is based on a safe control synthesis founded on timed properties. If a sensor fault is detected, the controller switches from normal behavior to a degraded one, where timed information replaces the information lost from the faulty sensor. Switching between normal and degraded behaviors is ensured through reconfiguration rules. The primary objective of this method is to implement the obtained control into a PLC. In order to achieve this goal, a method is proposed to translate the controllers of the two behaving modes and the reconfiguration rules into different Grafcets. This approach relies on the modular architecture of manufacturing systems to avoid the combinatorial explosion that occurs in several approaches.