Industrial Review

Introduction

The transition of the potentially viable fault tolerant flight control methodologies, as developed and evaluated within this GARTEUR Action Group, towards practical applications, requires a critical look at the design and safety issues concerning the developed adaptive control methodologies as an integrated part of the flight control system. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to provide an evaluation by representatives from industry to look at the potential of the results of this action group for industrial application. This also facilitates the necessary knowledge transfer between academia, research and industry which is one of the main principles of the GARTEUR framework and of this project. Clearly, the application of fault mitigating control technologies, or ‘intelligent’ adaptive control, has benefits in a wide area of industrial domains, but in this research, the evaluation has been focused on the potential within the aerospace community. It is not the intention to assess which of the developed fault tolerant control methodologies is the ‘best’, or has the best performance achieved in the benchmark as compared to other methods. Instead, the main objective is to assess the achieved maturity level, potential and open issues of the fault tolerant control designs, as developed in this action group, in terms of applicability, complexity, compatibility with (future) on-board processor requirements and overall flight safety. This also includes the innovative aspects of the presented control solutions to accommodate potentially catastrophic on-board system failures for recovery of the aircraft and ensure safe continuation of the flight or to improve the performance and operation of the aircraft in terms of economics and efficiency. It should be remembered that in this GARTEUR Action Group, adaptive control design concepts have been assessed on their viability, both from an aircraft performance and human factors aspect, while issues from an industrial design process perspective, including the required engineering tools, design process efficiency, synthesis and flight clearance have not been taken into account. This could, however, be the subject of a subsequent research programme in which the fault tolerant flight control algorithms that have been designed and demonstrated can be used as a starting point. The evaluation of the results of this GARTEUR Action Group, as described in this chapter, has been performed by several organisations. These include Airbus, representing the European aircraft manufacturing industry and Deimos-Space, an aerospace company specializing in industrialization of innovative guidance, navigation and control solutions.