The safe and reliable operation of technical systems is of great significance for the protection of human life and health, the environment, and of the vested economic value. The correct functioning of those systems has a profound impact also on production cost and product quality. The early detection of faults is critical in avoiding performance degradation and damage to the machinery or human life. Accurate diagnosis then helps to make the right decisions on emergency actions and repairs. Fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) has developed into a major area of research, at the intersection of systems and control engineering, artificial intelligence, applied mathematics and statistics, and such application fields as chemical, electrical, mechanical and aerospace engineering. IFAC has recognized the significance of FDD by launching a triennial symposium series dedicated to the subject. The SAFEPROCESS Symposium is organized every three years since the first symposium held in Baden-Baden in 1991. SAFEPROCESS 2006, the 6th IFAC Symposium on Fault Detection, Supervision and Safety of Technical Processes was held in Beijing, PR China. The program included three plenary papers, two semi-plenary papers, two industrial talks by internationally recognized experts and 258 regular papers, which have been selected out of a total of 387 regular and invited papers submitted. * Discusses the developments and future challenges in all aspects of fault diagnosis and fault tolerant control * 8 invited and 36 contributed sessions included with a special session on the demonstration of process monitoring and diagnostic software tools

A three-volume work bringing together papers presented at 'SAFEPROCESS 2003', including four plenary papers on statistical, physical-model-based and logical-model-based approaches to fault detection and diagnosis, as well as 178 regular papers.

With increasing demands for efficiency and product quality plus progress in the integration of automatic control systems in high-cost mechatronic and safety-critical processes, the field of supervision (or monitoring), fault detection and fault diagnosis plays an important role. The book gives an introduction into advanced methods of fault detection and diagnosis (FDD). After definitions of important terms, it considers the reliability, availability, safety and systems integrity of technical processes. Then fault-detection methods for single signals without models such as limit and trend checking and with harmonic and stochastic models, such as Fourier analysis, correlation and wavelets are treated. This is followed by fault detection with process models using the relationships between signals such as parameter estimation, parity equations, observers and principal component analysis. The treated fault-diagnosis methods include classification methods from Bayes classification to neural networks with decision trees and inference methods from approximate reasoning with fuzzy logic to hybrid fuzzy-neuro systems. Several practical examples for fault detection and diagnosis of DC motor drives, a centrifugal pump, automotive suspension and tire demonstrate applications.

These Proceedings provide a general overview as well as detailed information on the developing field of reliability and safety of technical processes in automatically controlled processes. The plenary papers present the state-of-the-art and an overview in the areas of aircraft and nuclear power stations, because these safety-critical system domains possess the most highly developed fault management and supervision schemes. Additional plenary papers covered the recent developments in analytical redundancy. In total there are 95 papers presented in these Proceedings.

Supervision, condition-monitoring, fault detection, fault diagnosis and fault management play an increasing role for technical processes and vehicles in order to improve reliability, availability, maintenance and lifetime. For safety-related processes fault-tolerant systems with redundancy are required in order to reach comprehensive system integrity. This book is a sequel of the book “Fault-Diagnosis Systems” published in 2006, where the basic methods were described. After a short introduction into fault-detection and fault-diagnosis methods the book shows how these methods can be applied for a selection of 20 real technical components and processes as examples, such as: Electrical drives (DC, AC) Electrical actuators Fluidic actuators (hydraulic, pneumatic) Centrifugal and reciprocating pumps Pipelines (leak detection) Industrial robots Machine tools (main and feed drive, drilling, milling, grinding) Heat exchangers Also realized fault-tolerant systems for electrical drives, actuators and sensors are presented. The book describes why and how the various signal-model-based and process-model-based methods were applied and which experimental results could be achieved. In several cases a combination of different methods was most successful. The book is dedicated to graduate students of electrical, mechanical, chemical engineering and computer science and for engineers.

This comprehensive work presents the status and likely development of fault diagnosis, an emerging discipline of modern control engineering. It covers fundamentals of model-based fault diagnosis in a wide context, providing a good introduction to the theoretical foundation and many basic approaches of fault detection.