PCA Methods and Evidence Based Filtering for Robust Aircraft Sensor Fault Diagnosis

In this paper PCA and D-PCA techniques are applied for the design of a Data Driven diagnostic Fault Isolation (FI) and Fault Estimation (FE) scheme for 18 primary sensors of a semi-autonomous aircraft. Specifically, Contributions-based, and Reconstruction-based Contributions approaches have been considered. To improve FI performance an inference mechanism derived from evidence-based decision making theory has been proposed. A detailed FI and FE study is presented for the True Airspeed sensor based on experimental data. Evidence Based Filtering (EBF) showed to be very effective particularly in reducing false alarms.