Design of fault tolerant control system for individual blade control helicopters

This dissertation presents the development of a fault tolerant control scheme for helicopters fitted with individually controlled blades. This novel approach attempts to improve fault tolerant capabilities of helicopter control system by increasing control redundancy using additional actuators for individual blade input and software re-mixing to obtain nominal or close to nominal conditions under failure. An advanced interactive simulation environment has been developed including modeling of sensor failure, swashplate actuator failure, individual blade actuator failure, and blade delamination to support the design, testing, and evaluation of the control laws. This simulation environment is based on the blade element theory for the calculation of forces and moments generated by the main rotor. This discretized model allows for individual blade analysis, which in turn allows measuring the consequences of a stuck blade, or loss of the surface area of the blade itself, with respect to the dynamics of the whole helicopter. The control laws are based on non-linear dynamic inversion and artificial neural network augmentation, which is a mix of linear and nonlinear methods that compensates for model inaccuracies due to linearization or failure. A stability analysis based on the Lyapunov function approach has shown that bounded tracking error is guaranteed, and under specific circumstances, global stability is guaranteed as well. An analysis over the degrees of freedom of the mechanical system and its impact over the helicopter handling qualities is also performed to measure the degree of redundancy achieved with the addition of individual blade actuators as compared to a classic swashplate helicopter configuration. Mathematical analysis and numerical simulation, using reconfiguration of the individual blade control under failure have shown that this control architecture can potentially improve the survivability of the aircraft and reduce pilot workload under failure conditions

Fault tolerant architectures for integrated aircraft electronics systems, task 2

The architectural basis for an advanced fault tolerant on-board computer to succeed the current generation of fault tolerant computers is examined. The network error tolerant system architecture is studied with particular attention to intercluster configurations and communication protocols, and to refined reliability estimates. The diagnosis of faults, so that appropriate choices for reconfiguration can be made is discussed. The analysis relates particularly to the recognition of transient faults in a system with tasks at many levels of priority. The demand driven data-flow architecture, which appears to have possible application in fault tolerant systems is described and work investigating the feasibility of automatic generation of aircraft flight control programs from abstract specifications is reported

Resource Requirements for Fault-Tolerant Quantum Simulation: The Transverse Ising Model Ground State

We estimate the resource requirements, the total number of physical qubits and computational time, required to compute the ground state energy of a 1-D quantum Transverse Ising Model (TIM) of N spin-1/2 particles, as a function of the system size and the numerical precision. This estimate is based on analyzing the impact of fault-tolerant quantum error correction in the context of the Quantum Logic Array (QLA) architecture. Our results show that due to the exponential scaling of the computational time with the desired precision of the energy, significant amount of error correciton is required to implement the TIM problem. Comparison of our results to the resource requirements for a fault-tolerant implementation of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm reveals that the required logical qubit reliability is similar for both the TIM problem and the factoring problem.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Evaluation of reliability modeling tools for advanced fault tolerant systems

The Computer Aided Reliability Estimation (CARE III) and Automated Reliability Interactice Estimation System (ARIES 82) reliability tools for application to advanced fault tolerance aerospace systems were evaluated. To determine reliability modeling requirements, the evaluation focused on the Draper Laboratories' Advanced Information Processing System (AIPS) architecture as an example architecture for fault tolerance aerospace systems. Advantages and limitations were identified for each reliability evaluation tool. The CARE III program was designed primarily for analyzing ultrareliable flight control systems. The ARIES 82 program's primary use was to support university research and teaching. Both CARE III and ARIES 82 were not suited for determining the reliability of complex nodal networks of the type used to interconnect processing sites in the AIPS architecture. It was concluded that ARIES was not suitable for modeling advanced fault tolerant systems. It was further concluded that subject to some limitations (the difficulty in modeling systems with unpowered spare modules, systems where equipment maintenance must be considered, systems where failure depends on the sequence in which faults occurred, and systems where multiple faults greater than a double near coincident faults must be considered), CARE III is best suited for evaluating the reliability of advanced tolerant systems for air transport

Semi-Markov adjunction to the Computer-Aided Markov Evaluator (CAME)

The rule-based Computer-Aided Markov Evaluator (CAME) program was expanded in its ability to incorporate the effect of fault-handling processes into the construction of a reliability model. The fault-handling processes are modeled as semi-Markov events and CAME constructs and appropriate semi-Markov model. To solve the model, the program outputs it in a form which can be directly solved with the Semi-Markov Unreliability Range Evaluator (SURE) program. As a means of evaluating the alterations made to the CAME program, the program is used to model the reliability of portions of the Integrated Airframe/Propulsion Control System Architecture (IAPSA 2) reference configuration. The reliability predictions are compared with a previous analysis. The results bear out the feasibility of utilizing CAME to generate appropriate semi-Markov models to model fault-handling processes

Assessing the reliability of diverse fault-tolerant software-based systems

We discuss a problem in the safety assessment of automatic control and protection systems. There is an increasing dependence on software for performing safety-critical functions, like the safety shut-down of dangerous plants. Software brings increased risk of design defects and thus systematic failures; redundancy with diversity between redundant channels is a possible defence. While diversity techniques can improve the dependability of software-based systems, they do not alleviate the difficulties of assessing whether such a system is safe enough for operation. We study this problem for a simple safety protection system consisting of two diverse channels performing the same function. The problem is evaluating its probability of failure in demand. Assuming failure independence between dangerous failures of the channels is unrealistic. One can instead use evidence from the observation of the whole system's behaviour under realistic test conditions. Standard inference procedures can then estimate system reliability, but they take no advantage of a system’s fault-tolerant structure. We show how to extend these techniques to take account of fault tolerance by a conceptually straightforward application of Bayesian inference. Unfortunately, the method is computationally complex and requires the conceptually difficult step of specifying 'prior' distributions for the parameters of interest. This paper presents the correct inference procedure, exemplifies possible pitfalls in its application and clarifies some non-intuitive issues about reliability assessment for fault-tolerant software