Fault-tolerant state estimation for stochastic systems over sensor networks with intermittent sensor faults

• Active fault-tolerant strategy is introduced to distributed state estimation scheme. • Intermittent fault (IF) detector is designed and the detectability of IF is analyzed. • Estimation errors can remain the prescribed performance under the influence of IF. In this paper, the problem of distributed fault-tolerant state estimation is studied for stochastic systems over sensor networks with intermittent sensor faults. Compared with the traditional state estimation algorithms, the distinct advantage of fault-tolerant state estimation is that the estimator can keep good performance whether sensor faults occur or not. Different from the previous literature concerning with distributed fault diagnosis, the distributed fault diagnosis problem is investigated in this paper for intermittent faults, whose appearing time, disappearing time and magnitude are all nondeterministic. The distributed fault-tolerant state estimation scheme is constructed, in which the appearing time and disappearing time of intermittent faults are detected, intermittent faults are estimated and compensated. By means of the matrix inequality technique, the H ∞ performance of state estimation errors is guaranteed by properly choosing the estimator parameters. Finally, two examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.