Anti-windup reconfigurable control for dynamic positioning vessel with thruster faults

Abstract

In this study, an anti-windup reconfigurable control method is developed for dynamic positioning vessel in the presence of thruster faults and input saturation. The designed reconfiguration block acting as a virtual thruster aims at hiding the faults from the nominal controller. Also, it is added into the closed-loop system between the nominal controller and the dynamic positioning system. A thruster saturation-failure fault matrix technique is proposed to regard the thruster saturation as thruster fault, meanwhile an auxiliary system is constructed to achieve extra compensation for the adverse effects induced by input saturation. Furthermore, an integral sliding mode control method is presented to accommodate the nonlinear items in the reconfiguration block. An adaptive technique is also employed to preserve robustness against the unknown uncertainties. Finally, a vessel dynamic positioning control process is adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.