Tool-Based Design and Evaluation of Resilient Flight Control Systems

A large transport aircraft simulation benchmark (REconfigurable COntrol for Vehicle Emergency Return RECOVER) has been developed within the European GARTEUR Flight Mechanics Action Group 16 (FM-AG(16)) on Fault Tolerant Control (2004-2008) for the integrated evaluation of fault detection, identification (FDI) and reconfigurable flight control systems. The benchmark includes a suitable set of assessment criteria and failure cases, based on reconstructed accident scenarios, to assess the potential of new adaptive control strategies to improve aircraft survivability. The application of reconstruction and modeling techniques, using accident flight data for validation, has resulted in high fidelity non-linear aircraft and fault models to evaluate new Fault Tolerant Flight Control (FTFC) concepts and their real-time performance to accommodate in-flight failures (Edwards et al., 2010).