Sensor Fault Diagnosis

Book excerpt: Recent advances in information and communication technologies, embedded systems and sensor networks have generated significant research activity in the development of so-called cyber-physical systems. An example of a large network of cyber-physical systems is a smart city with intelligent infrastructures for supporting the environment, energy and water distribution, transportation, telecommunication, health care, home automation, and so on. From a systems point of view, safety, reliability and fault tolerance become key challenges in designing cyber-physical systems. One of the major issues is detecting and correcting faults in the sensors that form a critical part of these networks and systems. For example, if two sensors should provide similar information, how do you know which one is at fault should their readings suddenly greatly differ? Sensor Fault Diagnosis addresses all the issues in sensor fault detection and isolation. It provides a clear tutorial on the challenges and models that can be used to address them. It describes, in detail, the requirements for modeling the systems, designing the architecture, detecting faults, isolating those faults, and presents learning techniques for enhancing performance. This monograph will appeal to all researchers and students working on large sensor networks and systems.