A New Topology-Switching Strategy for Fault Diagnosis of Multi-Agent Systems Based on Belief Rule Base

Effective fault-diagnosis strategies have been the focus of research on multi-agent systems (MASs). In this paper, the belief rule base (BRB)-based distributed fault-diagnosis problem for MASs is investigated, and a topology-switching strategy is developed to increase the reliability of fault-diagnosis model. Firstly, a BRB-based distributed fault-diagnosis model is constructed for the MAS with multiple faults, then expert knowledge is used to judge whether the agent is faulty. Then, considering that the system may be influenced by the fault or some other factors and thus leading to a decrease in the accuracy of the fault-diagnosis results, a topology-switching strategy based on the average distance of the output diagnosis accuracy is proposed to update the topology of the agent so that the fault-diagnosis results can be more reliable. Note that the topology-switching threshold is designed based on the average distance between the accuracy of the fault diagnosis of each agent. The method proposed in this paper can solve the problem when the fault-diagnosis accuracy of the model is affected by some common factors and thus decreases, and can improve the reliability of the fault-diagnosis model very well. Finally, the effectiveness of the BRB-based distributed fault-diagnosis model and the proposed topology-switching strategy to improve the fault-diagnosis accuracy is verified by simulation examples.