Fuzzy Logic Based Interactive Multiple Model Fault Diagnosis for PEM Fuel Cell Systems

The problem of fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) in dynamic systems has received considerable attention in last decades due to the growing complexity of modern engineering systems and ever increasing demand for fault tolerance, cost efficiency, and reliability (Willsky, 1976; Basseville, 1988). Existing FDD approaches can be roughly divided into two major categories including model-based and knowledge-based approaches (Venkatasubramanian et al., 2003a; Venkatasubramanian et al., 2003b). Model-based approaches make use of the quantitative analytical model of a physical system. Knowledgebased approaches do not need full analytical modeling and allow one to use qualitative models based on the available information and knowledge of a physical system. Whenever the mathematical models describing the system are available, analytical model-based methods are preferred because they are more amenable to performance analysis. Generally, there are two steps in the procedure of model-based FDD. First, on the basis of the available observations and a mathematical model of the system, the state variable x and test statistics are required to be obtained. Then, based on the generated test statistics, it is required to decide on the potential occurrence of a fault. For linear and Gaussian systems, the Kalman filter (KF) is known to be optimal and employed for state estimation. The innovations from the KF are used as the test statistics, based on which hypothesis tests can be carried out for fault detection (Belcastro & Weinstein, 2002). In reality, however, the models representing the evolution of the system and the noise in observations typically exhibit complex nonlinearity and non-Gaussian distributions, thus precluding analytical solution. One popular strategy for estimating the state of such a system as a set of observations becomes available online is to use sequential Monte-Carlo (SMC) methods, also known as particle filters (PFs) (Doucet et al., 2001). These methods allow for a complete representation of the posterior probability distribution function (PDF) of the states by particles (Guo & Wang, 2004; Li & Kadirkamanathan, 2001). The aforementioned FDD strategies are single-model-based. However, a single-model-based FDD approach is not adequate to handle complex failure scenarios. One way to treat this