SummaryThis article investigates the problem of designing a distributed fault estimation observer (DFEO) for a given linear time invariant observed system with disturbances. The DFEO consists of a network of local fault estimation observers. The local observers at the network nodes are physically distributed and hence each of them has access to only part of the output of the observed system. Each local fault estimation observer communicates with its neighbors as prescribed by the given network graph. Both full order and reduced order DFEO's are presented in this article. A systematic design procedure for DFEO gains is addressed, enabling the estimation error dynamics to be robust against the effects of the external process disturbance and the derivative of the fault. The numerical design of our DFEO is amounts to solving an optimization problem with constraints of a bank of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed fault estimation approach by means of a number of simulation results.