Fault-Tolerant Control of a Boeing 747-100/200 Based on a Laguerre Function-Based MPC Scheme

Fault-tolerant control (FTC) is of paramount for the safety of aircraft in the presence of any faults due to its safety-critical property. An active FTC scheme is presented and implemented for the nonlinear benchmark model of Boeing 747-100/200 to safely land aircraft even in the presence of major actuator faults/failures. Furthermore, for the improvement of its on-line fault-tolerant capability, Laguerre functions based MPC (LF-MPC) scheme is further developed and applied to the fault-tolerant controller design. The benefits of LF-MPC scheme are 1) redistributing the control efforts efficiently to the remaining functional actuators in case of faults, 2) increasing the on-line fault-tolerant capability by reducing optimized parameters. In addition, time delay of fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) information is also considered and integrated into the feedback control loop. The effectiveness is demonstrated on the well-known Boeing 747-100/200 benchmark through a landing phase with elevators stuck in the process of landing.