New technological advances and the requirements to increasingly abide by new safety laws in engineering design projects highly affects industrial products in areas such as automotive, aerospace and railway industries. The necessity arises to design reduced-cost hi-tech products with minimal complexity, optimal performance, effective parameter robustness properties, and high reliability with fault tolerance. In this context the control system design plays an important role and the impact is crucial relative to the level of cost efficiency of a product. Measurement of required information for the operation of the design control system in any product is a vital issue, and in such cases a number of sensors can be available to select from in order to achieve the desired system properties. However, for a complex engineering system a manual procedure to select the best sensor set subject to the desired system properties can be very complicated, time consuming or even impossible to achieve. This is more evident in the case of large number of sensors and the requirement to comply with optimum performance. The thesis describes a comprehensive study of sensor selection for control and fault tolerance with the particular application of an ElectroMagnetic Levitation system (being an unstable, nonlinear, safety-critical system with non-trivial control performance requirements). The particular aim of the presented work is to identify effective sensor selection frameworks subject to given system properties for controlling (with a level of fault tolerance) the MagLev suspension system. A particular objective of the work is to identify the minimum possible sensors that can be used to cover multiple sensor faults, while maintaining optimum performance with the remaining sensors. The tools employed combine modern control strategies and multiobjective constraint optimisation (for tuning purposes) methods. An important part of the work is the design and construction of a 25kg MagLev suspension to be used for experimental verification of the proposed sensor selection frameworks.

The thesis deals with design of configuration software, ConfPix, for radiationdetecting sensor - SpacePix2. It describesdesign and implementation, as well as thetesting procedure. The software is implemented in Python, with Graphical UserInterface created using the Tkinter module for Python. The application is designed as versatile and can be used in future missions requiring the configurationof pixel radiation detectors from SpacePixfamily. The SpacePix2 sensor is a new technology developed at the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineeringat Czech Technical University in Pragueand will be tested in orbit as a part of theSpace Dosimetry System Demonstrator instrument developed by the esc Aerospaces.r.o. company. Cosmic radiation sources and radiation detectors are described in the theoretical part of the thesis. The SpaceDosimetry System Demonstrator instrument, SpacePix Radiation Monitor detector and the SpacePix2 sensor are described as well.