Sliding Mode Control with Application to Fault-Tolerant Control: Assessment and Open Problems

This paper is prepared within a collaboration between the Instituto Politecnico Nacional, which is a Mexican research institute that manages research on sliding-mode control theory, and the ARIA research team of the Integration du Materiau au Systeme Lab., a French research group that engages research on model-based fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control theories. The paper reviews the application of sliding mode control techniques to fault tolerant control and provides perspectives leading to posing some open problems. Operating principles, definitions of the basic concepts are recalled along with the control objectives and design procedures. The evolution of the sliding mode control technique through five generations (as classified by Fridman, Moreno and coworkers) is reviewed. Their respective design procedures, limitations, and robustness properties are also highlighted. The application of the five generations of sliding-mode controllers to fault-tolerant control is discussed. The focus is on some open problems that are judged to commonly be overlooked. Some applications in real-world systems are also presented.