Active Fault Diagnosis Method for Vehicles in Platoon Formation

This paper presents an active fault diagnosis (AFD) method with reduced excitation for detection and identification of sensor faults of vehicles in a platoon formation. By introducing a probing signal into the platooning, it will allow an active excitation of the system, reveling a residual component, with the same frequency, that can be explored to obtain a fault identification of specific system faults. A supervisor is introduced to monitor the platoon behavior and activate the auxiliary input whenever the system natural excitation is insufficient for a clear fault diagnosis. This solution will allow the fault diagnosis to behave as active or passive through the adaptive signal provided by the supervisor. A dual Youla-Jabr-Bongiorno-Kucera (YJBK) matrix transfer function, also known as fault signature matrix (FSM) is investigated to get a fault diagnosis. In order to obtain an online identification of specific faults in the system, a Taylor approximation of the FSM is pursued. Computational simulations with a high-fidelity full-vehicle model, provided by CarSim, are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed active approach. A direct comparison between an active and a passive behavior in the same scenario shows that the active fault diagnosis method outperforms the passive approach whenever the dynamic behavior does not provide sufficient excitation. Furthermore, the excitation supervisor is able to significantly reduce the amount of artificial excitation introduced into the system ensuring a more energy efficient active fault diagnosis.