This book provides the first systematic treatment of fault-tolerant control for switched distributed parameter systems—a class of systems in which switching simultaneously alters generator domains, boundary conditions, and state spaces, creating challenges with no finite-dimensional counterpart.
Beginning with structural analysis, the book characterizes controllability via an operator-valued Gramian and establishes a quantitative fault-recoverability criterion. It then constructs optimal switching-law compensators for discrete faults and boundary controllers for switched parabolic and hyperbolic PDEs against continuous faults. The theory is extended to multi-agent coordination through spatial continualization, with applications to formation deployment and cluster-level path planning on Riemannian manifolds. Illustrative examples from traffic networks, chemical reactors, and autonomous swarms ground the developments throughout.
Readers gain an operator-theoretic toolkit readily transferable to their own switched PDE or networked multi-agent problems. The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in control theory, applied mathematics, and distributed parameter systems, as well as engineers in safety-critical processes and autonomous platforms.
About the Author :
Dr. Yacun Guan received the M.S. degree in Detection Technology and Automatic Equipment from Zhengzhou University, China, in 2016, and the Ph.D. degree in Control Theory and Control Engineering from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China, in 2022. She is currently with the School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, China. Dr. Guan focuses on the research of distributed parameter systems control, complex network regulation, and swarm collaborative control.
Prof. Hao Yang received the B.Sc. degree in electrical automation from Nanjing Tech University, Nanjing, China, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degrees in automatic control from Université de Lille 1: Sciences et Technologies, Lille, France, and Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), Nanjing, China, both in 2009. Since 2010, he has been working with College of Automation Engineering in NUAA, where he has been a Full Professor since 2015.
His research interest includes control, optimization, game and fault tolerance of switched and network systems with their aerospace applications. He was the recipient of the National Science Fund of China for Excellent Young Scholars in 2016, and the Top-Notch Young Talents of Central Organization Department of China in 2017.
Prof. Bin Jiang received the Ph.D. degree in automatic control from Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, in 1995. He has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow, a Research Fellow, an Invited Professor, and a Visiting Professor in Singapore, France, USA, and Canada, respectively. He is currently the President of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China, and a Chair Professor with the Cheung Kong Scholar Program, Ministry of Education. He has authored eight books and over 100 referred international journal articles.
His current research interests include intelligent fault diagnosis, fault-tolerant control, and their applications to helicopters, satellites, and high-speed trains. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), and a Fellow of the Chinese Association of Automation (CAA); the Chair of the Control Systems Chapter in the IEEE Nanjing Section; the President of Nanjing Branch of AAIA; and a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Fault Detection, Supervision, and Safety of Technical Processes. He was a recipient of the National Natural Science Award of China.
Prof. Youmin Zhang received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in automatic control from the Department of Automatic Control, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China, in 1983, 1986, and 1995, respectively. He is currently a Professor with the Department of Mechanical, Industrial and Aerospace Engineering & Concordia Institute of Aerospace Design and Innovation (CIADI), Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He has authored 10 books and more than 700 journal and conference papers with high citations at Google Scholar and ScholarGPS etc..
His current research interests include fault/attack diagnosis, fault-tolerant and attack-resilient control, cooperative guidance, navigation, control, remote sensing and imaging processing for unmanned aerial/space/ground/marine vehicles with applications to forest fire monitoring and fighting, renewable energies, smart grids, and smart cities under the framework of cyber-physical systems. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Ontario, Canada, a Fellow of Canadian Society of Mechanical Engineering (CSME), and a Member of Technical Committee for several scientific societies.
