This paper proposes a delay compensation strategy
for a distributed fault detection architecture, allowing to
manage delays and packet losses in the communication network
between the Local Fault Diagnosers. A novel consensus-based
estimator with time-varying weights is introduced, permitting
to improve detectability in the case of variables shared among
more than one subsystem. In the consensus protocol, at each
step each agent uses only the information given by the agent and
the communication link which are more reliable at that time.
The convergence of the proposed estimator is demonstrated and
analytical conditions for detectability are derived.