Communication failure tolerant distributed Kalman filter

A method and system include a distributed network of filters (205, 210, 215, 220, 315, 320) having a topology corresponding to an interconnection map (100) of a process to be controlled, each filter modeling a sub-process of the process. Each filter (205, 210, 215, 220, 315, 320) is interconnected (240, 242, 245, 250, 255, 717) to receive (510) an input vector of process measurements corresponding to a local state of the process and to receive process variables. The filters are adapted to determine a communication failure (520) and responsive to the communication failure, correlations of the local state with the state of subsystems estimated by filters that are not accessible due to the communication failure are set to zero and wherein a local state covariance is increased (530) and an unknown observer model to replace interconnection inputs (530).