Development of fault-tolerant flight control systems in realistic environment

当一个人坐在飞机上或开车时，最重要的担忧是什么？答案是飞机或汽车的“安全性”，这并不令人惊讶。这是一个与此类安全关键系统的可靠性、安全性和容错控制相关的问题。提高飞机、航天器、汽车、核电站、化工或石化厂等安全关键系统的可靠性和安全性极其重要，因为此类系统发生故障的后果可能是灾难性的。必须设计能够容忍这些系统中潜在故障的控制系统，以提高可靠性和可用性，同时提供所需的性能。这种类型的控制系统通常称为容错控制系统(FTCS)。特别是，应用于飞行控制的飞行控制系统被称为容错飞行控制系统(FTFCS)。本研究的主要目的是为FTFCS的设计和分析提供先进和实用的解决方案，将现实的物理约束和实际考虑融入到FTFCS中，使本研究的结果具有相关性并直接适用于加拿大的航空航天工业。短期目标是基于高保真和高度非线性的飞机模型在现实测试环境中开发、分析和测试不同的、有效的FTFCS设计。将开发先进实用的故障诊断和可重构飞行控制方案，用于在飞行或着陆阶段存在执行器和操纵面故障以及机翼严重分离损坏的情况下。其长期目标是发展涵盖分析、综合、仿真、飞行模拟器测试和实际工程应用的完整的FTFCS理论，并将开发的容错飞行控制技术转移到具有竞争优势的加拿大航空航天工业。

What is the most important concern when one sits on the airplane or drives a car? It would not be surprising for the answer to be the "safety" of the airplane or car. This is an issue relevant to the reliability, safety and fault-tolerant control of such types of safety-critical systems. Improving the reliability and safety of safety-critical systems, such as airplanes, space vehicles, automobiles, nuclear power plants, chemical or petrochemical plants, is extremely important since the consequences of failures in such systems can be catastrophic. It is necessary to design control systems that are capable of tolerating potential failures in these systems to improve the reliability and availability whilst providing desirable performance. This type of control systems is often known as Fault-Tolerant Control Systems (FTCS). In particular, FTCS applied to flight control are referred to as Fault-Tolerant Flight Control Systems (FTFCS).The main objective of this proposed research is to provide advanced and practical solutions for FTFCS design and analysis which incorporate realistic physical constraints and practical considerations in FTFCS so that the results from this research are relevant and directly applicable to the aerospace industries in Canada.The short-term objectives are to develop, analyze and test different and effective FTFCS designs based on high-fidelity and highly nonlinear aircraft models in realistic test environments. Advanced and practical schemes for fault diagnosis and reconfigurable flight control in the presence of actuators and control surfaces failures and severe engine separation damages of wings during flight or landing phase will be developed. The long-term objectives are to develop a complete theory of FTFCS ranging from analysis, synthesis, simulation, flight simulator test, and practical engineering applications and to transfer the developed fault-tolerant flight control technologies to Canadian aeronautical and aerospace industries with a competitive edge.