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The tale of fault tolerant control: Pt 2
Aviation safety includes preventing aviation accidents and incidents through research, as well as the design of aircraft and aviation infrastructure. The aviation industry is subject to significant regulation and oversight.
The aircraft safety is demonstrated according to extensive airworthiness regulations. These regulations involve qualitative and quantitative assessment to analyze faults, interaction (maintenance, crew) faults, and external environmental hazard.
In order to certificate Fault Tolerant Controls, a safety system assessment analyses and studies all the possible failure combinations. This analysis can lead to major flight control architecture modifications and contributes to a more robust system. To comply with the certification from the regulation authorities, some requirements must be satisfied:
The development process must comply with the following guidelines: ARP4754/ED7911 for aircraft systems, DO178/ED12 for software and DO254/ED8013 for hardware.
Hardware redundancy: comply with the use of multiple computers and different distributed power and hydraulic sources for control surface actuation. Redundant sensors also provide air data and inertial information to other systems through dedicated, separate but identical units.
