Control performance monitoring and degradation recovery in automatic control systems: A review, some new results, and future perspectives

Abstract This paper addresses control performance monitoring (CPM) and degradation recovering in automatic control systems. It begins with a re-visit of CPM techniques and a summary of the major limitations of the existing CPM methods. They are (i) deficit in assessing control performance degradation caused by different types of disturbances and environment uncertainties, (ii) incapability for predicting performance degradation, and (iii) deficiency of efficient performance degradation recovering methods. In order to meet increasing demands of next generation automatic control systems for higher system performance, novel CPM methods have been developed in recent years, including performance assessment of control systems with deterministic disturbances and uncertainties, prediction of control performance degradation, and recovery of control performance degradation. Some of these methods and algorithms are introduced in the second part of this paper. The basis of these methods is a so-called residual centred model of feedback control systems, which allows a unified handling of control, monitoring and diagnosis in feedback control systems corrupted by disturbances and uncertainties. The focuses of these methods are on (i) introduction of the loop performance degradation index for the assessment and prediction of performance degradation in automatic control systems, (ii) predictive detection and estimation of loop performance degradation, and (iii) a data-driven performance degradation recovering scheme. The paper is concluded by a short summary of three future perspective topics, (i) prediction of economic system performance monitoring and estimation, (ii) reinforcement learning aided system performance recovery, and (iii) CPM digital twin.