Cooperative Fault Tolerant Control With State Constraints for Nonlinear Multiple-Agent Systems

Constraints on system states are essential performance requirements in various control systems. This article delves into the problem of cooperative fault-tolerant control under state constraints for a specific class of nonlinear multiple-agent systems. To achieve an asymptotic estimation of states and faults, we propose a distributed state–fault observer that leverages the structural information of faults. Notably, this observer operates independently of the choice of control input, thus decoupling it from the controller design. Alongside estimates of states and faults, we develop a cooperative fault-tolerant controller to ensure that the constrained state difference remains within the prescribed range throughout the system's evolution, ultimately converging to the desired value. We demonstrate the applicability of this approach in the context of cooperative fault-tolerant cruise control for multiple high-speed trains, where we consider simultaneous constraints on train position and velocity.