A simulation environment for design and testing of aircraft adaptive fault‐tolerant control systems

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present the development of a Matlab/Simulink‐based simulation environment for the design and testing of indirect and direct adaptive flight control laws with fault tolerant capabilities to deal with the occurrence of actuator and sensor failures.Design/methodology/approachThe simulation environment features a modular architecture and a detailed graphical user interface for simulation scenario set‐up. Indirect adaptive flight control laws are implemented based on an optimal control design and frequency domain‐based online parameter estimation. Direct adaptive flight control laws consist of non‐linear dynamic inversion performed at a reference nominal flight condition augmented with artificial neural networks (NNs) to compensate for inversion errors and abnormal flight conditions following the occurrence of actuator or sensor failures. Failure detection, identification, and accommodation schemes relying on neural estimators are developed and implemented.FindingsThe simulation environment provides a valuable platform for the evaluation and validation of fault‐tolerant flight control laws.Research limitations/implicationsThe modularity of the simulation package allows rapid reconfiguration of control laws, aircraft model, and detection schemes. This flexibility allows the investigation of various design issues such as: the selection of control laws architecture (including the type of the neural augmentation), the tuning of NN parameters, the selection of parameter identification techniques, the effects of anti‐control saturation techniques, the selection and the tuning of the control allocation scheme, as well as the selection and tuning of the failure detection and identification schemes.Originality/valueThe novelty of this research efforts resides in the development and the integration of a comprehensive simulation environment allowing a very detailed validation of a number of control laws for the purpose of verifying the performance of actuator and sensor failure detection, identification, and accommodation schemes.