<p>In this study, a decentralized fault tolerant tracking control strategy is presented for a class of strongly interconnected nonlinear systems with time varying asymmetric state constraints. Firstly, a single hidden layer feedforward network with extreme learning machine (ELM) is applied to approximate the unknown nonlinear function and unknown strongly interconnections. Then, a time varying asymmetric barrier Lyapunov function (TVABLF) is designed to ensure that the time varying asymmetric constraints impose on all the state variables. On this basis, a decentralized fault tolerant tracking control approach is proposed for the considered interconnected nonlinear systems by using backstepping design procedures, and the nonlinear filter with compensation term is introduced to overcome the difficulty of “explosion of complexity”. Meanwhile, an auxiliary dynamical system is designed to solve the problem of input saturation. The asymptotical tracking performance of the system output signals is analyzed by using Lyapunov approach. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed strategy is illustrated by the practical interconnected nonlinear systems.</p>