An Innovative Algorithmic Safety Strategy for Networked Electrical Drive Systems

In this paper we address the safety strategies for networked electrical drive systems, in the context of industrial automation. Specifically, it is considered the handling of errors and faults that may occur during the execution of safety related functions, on a set of electrical drives. Such devices, which operate in a coordinated way, are connected via an industrial communication network and use a safety industrial protocol. In this respect, a novel approach that exploits a distributed consensus algorithm to identify and possibly recover the aforementioned errors is devised and discussed in comparison with a traditional safe shut-down strategy. The theoretical performance figures and the effectiveness of the proposed approach are evaluated in a real industrial case study considering two different widespread network topologies.