In this paper, a new fault-tolerant control approach is presented for a class of nonlinear systems, which preserves system stability despite a time delay in fault detection. The faults are assumed to occur in the actuators and are modeled for the general form of affine nonlinear systems. A fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) block is designed based on the multiple model method. The bank of extended Kalman filters (EKF) is used to detect predefined actuator faults and to estimate the unknown parameters of actuator position. The estimated parameters are then used to correct the model of the faulty system and to reconfigure the controller. The reconfigurable controller is designed based on the stabilizing nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) scheme. On the other hand, in the duration between fault occurrence and fault detection, because of the mismatch between the process and the model, the system states may go off the attraction region. The proposed method is based on designing multiple local controllers for individual predefined faults. Depending on the value of a system variable at the moment of fault detection, one of these controllers will operate. This leads to a stability region of a set of auxiliary equilibrium points (AEPs), which is larger than the attraction region. Moreover, a framework for preserving system stability is presented. Finally, a practical chemical process example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of this method. (C) 2013 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.