PhD Proposal 2013

School: SUPELEC
Laboratory: Chaire SSDE
Team: Chaire SSDE

Web site: www.ssde.fr

Head of the team: Enrico Zio

Supervisor: Enrico Zio (25%)

Co-supervisor (SUPELEC ): Sorin Olaru
(20%);
Co-supervisor (L2S- CNRS-SUPELEC):
Silviu-Iulian Niculescu (20%)

Email: enrico.zio@supelec.fr

Co-supervisors (CENTRALE): Nicola

Pedroni (20%), Ionela Prodan (15%)
Collaboration with other partners during
this PhD: EDF (pending)

Title: Development of an innovative control theory framework for the safety analysis
of complex engineered systems
Scientific fields: System Analysis, Reliability, Control Theory, Discrete Even Systems
Keywords: interconnected dynamic systems, fault state observability and
controllability, dynamic reliability, dynamic control, dynamic safety margins

Context of the research: motivation and scientific objectives

Modern technical systems consist of many components of different natures, including mechatronic ones
like sensors, processors and actuators driven by controllers. The embedded components offer new and
more complex functionalities to the systems, for improved and preferably customized performance.
Moreover, it is often the case that a system is distributed in space as well as in time, and its treatment as a
unified, compact entity is not feasible anymore. For a concrete example, consider the networks for energy
supply (the so called electric ``power grids) and their foreseen future ``smart development in response
to the challenges posed ahead for the vital service they provide. These systems are pervasive in our
everydays life as they reach virtually every home, school, hospital, office, factory and institution.
Originally developed as loosely interconnected networks of local systems, electric power grids have
extended on large scales, across regional and national boundaries. Recently, distributed resources, mostly
small power generators driven by renewable sources (e.g. solar and wind), are being increasingly connected
to the existing backbone. The extent of the interconnectedness, the number and variety of power sources
and generators, of controls and loads, make electric power grids among the most complex engineered
systems.
As the complexity of the system increases, also its susceptibility and sensitivity to faults does. Depending
on the scale of the systems and the integration of diverse components, faults may lead to undesired
consequences (in some cases quite serious). There are safety-critical systems in which faults are not merely
inconvenient but can become catastrophic (as for example healthy related or transportation applications).
Therefore, one fundamental issue is to detect and isolate faults and malfunctions in complex engineered
systems, e.g. hot spots in power plants, receivers with broken glass covers or vacuum losses, and heliostat
faults.

On the architectural front, large-scale systems require new distributed control structures to fully exploit the
new, and widely distributed, sensors and actuators. It is infeasible for centralized controller to address
every controllable load individually, yet actions taken by local controllers must be consistent with global
performance objectives. With the same electric power grid serving as example, consider the fact that the
consumers have local control capabilities, while the systems operator or supplier at the same time has the
responsibility of maintaining balance between production and demand. In this context the control
architecture naturally evolves from distributed to hierarchical [1].
Different academic and professional communities have grappled with the multidisciplinary issues of complex
system safety and accident causation, including sociologists, engineers, and management scientists. However,
not enough crosstalk across disciplines occurs, and even within engineering, very limited interaction has
occurred between the Risk Analysis, Reliability and Control Theory communities [2], [3].

Research work plan: implementation

The research subject of the proposed thesis concerns the development and application of a new framework
for the analysis of the failure behaviour of complex systems made of numerous and diverse components
interconnected in a network. The framework aims at integrating the aspects, models and methods of safety,
dynamic reliability, fault detection and isolation, within a supporting framework from state control theory,
with the final objective of improving the analysis of system reliability and safety.
The project starts from an in-depth theoretical study of the concepts and methods of system reliability and
safety, fault detection and isolation, and control theory. The knowledge built will enable to venture into the
few existing papers which have started posing the questions of integration of these subjects, for further
extension, implementation and application of the methods [3], [4].

Some theoretical directions envisaged are:

develop a control theory setting to frame the state transition process of degradation/failure/recovery
dynamics in complex engineered systems;
develop hierarchical strategies to control a number of interconnected dynamic systems [5];
develop set-theoretic methods for acquiring robust fault detection and isolation mechanisms [6].
This research brings together separate disciplines to bear on the intrinsically multi-disciplinary problems of
complex system analysis, reliability, safety and accident prevention. Also it involves rigorous application
of concepts like controllability, observation and diagnosability in the pursuit of discovering concrete,
theoretically sound principles of design for system safety and operation.
Significant theoretical, modeling and computational challenges are expected to emerge during the research
work. In particular, we expect significant (but surmountable nonetheless) difficulties in the description of
the conditions of faults and in the subsequent resolution of constrained optimum problems (e.g., for
coherent fault diagnosis the system needs to be persistently excited which requires the presence of nonconvex constraints).
The verification of the models and methods developed will be sought on meaningful case studies. In
particular, we expect to apply the results on large-scale systems with fast and/or remote components (such
that a human controller is not enough for accurate fault diagnosis and plant control).
The thesis work is expected to produce a number of scientific works on peer reviewed, indexed journals (a
minimum of two) and of presentations at recognized conferences (a minimum of two).
The educational objective of the proposed PhD thesis is to prepare an expert in the reliable design, control
and operation of complex systems, with the capability of performing advanced analyses and optimizations.
Innovative character
Aspects like reliability, safety and the associated notions of fault detection and isolation are instrumental in
todays complex and highly structured engineering systems (e.g., in transportation, communication or
power networks). To the best of our knowledge, applications in these directions are actual and in need of
(major) improvement. Therefore, we believe that significant theoretical as well as practical results can be
achieved through this thesis.

References:
[1] Picasso B., De Vito D., Scattolini R. Colaneri P. (2010): An MPC approach to the design of two-layer
hierarchical control systems. Automatica, vol. 46, no. 5, pp. 823--831.
[2] Zio E. (2009): Computational methods for reliability and risk analysis, vol. 14, World Scientific
Publishing Company Incorporated.
[3] Raghvendra V., Cowlagi R.V, Saleh J.H. (2012): Coordinability and Consistency in Accident Causation
and Prevention: Formal System-Theoretic Concepts for Safety in Multilevel Systems. Risk Analysis, pp.
121--134.
[4] Bakolas E., Saleh J.H. (2011): Augmenting defense-in-depth with the concepts of observability and
diagnosability from Control Theory and Discrete Event Systems. Reliability Engineering and System
safety, pp. 184-193.
[5] Trangbaek K., Bemdtsen J., Stoustrup J. (2011): Hierarchical control for smart grids. In Proceedings of
the 18th IFAC World Congress, pp. 61-- 67, Milano, Italy.
[6] Olaru S., De Dona J.A., Seron M.M., Stoican F. (2010): Positive invariant sets for fault tolerant
multisensor control schemes. International Journal of Control, vol 83, no. 12, pp. 2622--2640.