DEVELOPMENT OF AN ON-BOARD FAULT TOLERANT CONTROL STRATEGY WITH APPLICATION TO THE GARTEUR AG16 BENCHMARK

This paper presents a Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) strategy to provide a highly reliable reconfigurable control capacity for safety critical systems in faulty situations. The paper describes mainly the status of an on-going research work which is undertaken within GARTEUR FM-AG(16)2 Action Group. The developed techniques are applied to a faulty scenario of a realistic nonlinear benchmark of a large transport aircraft. The goal is to provide a “self-repairing” capability to enable the pilot to land the aircraft safely in the event of a stabilizer fault. Once the fault is detected by the Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) unit, a fault compensation loop is activated. A key feature of the proposed strategy is that the design of FTC loop is done independently of the nominal autopilot and the nominal Flight Control System (FCS) in place. Nonlinear simulation results demonstrate the capability and viability of the proposed active FTC scheme.