In-flight Fault Detection and Isolation in Aircraft Flight Control Systems

Abstract
In this paper the problem of test design for realtime fault detection and isolation (FDI) in the flight control system of fixed-wing aircraft. We focus on the faults that are manifested in the control surface elements(e.g., aileron, elevator, rudder and stabilizer) of an aircraft. A neural network-based flight control simulator, FLTZ, is used for the simulation of various faults in fixed-wing aircraft flight control systems for the purpose of FDI.

Introduction
Over the decade aircraft flight control systems have evolved from rudimentary electromechanical systems to a highly sophisticated integrated navigation, flight, and vehicle management system. Generic neural network-based flight control systems, incorporating direct adaptive control with dynamic model inversion techniques, have provided an efficient and inexpensive solution to the aircraft-specific control law development and implementation problem.

 Using pre-trained and on-line learning neural networks together , the flight control system generates control surface commands consistent with desired aircraft handling qualities while compensating for errors in the off-line training set and adapting to changes in aircraft dynamics due to failures.

Challenges of FDI in the flight control systems of fixed wing aircraft

1. A real-time simulation model of the flight control system of a generic transport aircraft is available in FLTZ. However, a complete mathematical model is not readily available for use. This situation also arises frequently when a subsystem vendor protects the intellectual property of the system details. In this case, the subsystem vendor may provide an executable simulator to the system integrator.

2. The system is reasonably complex with 13 primary fault classes (each primary fault class has 1 or 2 sub-classes), and 50 monitored variables.
3. The flight envelope variables (e.g., velocity, altitude, etc) and environmental variables (e.g., wind velocity, turbulence, weather, etc) are continuous; hence, the possible combinations of these variables result in extremely large number of operating modes. Design of tests that have (nearly) invariant outcomes for this large number of operating modes is an engineering challenge.

 Lacks proper mathematical model and hence rules out the possibility of an analytical model. The aircraft flight control system is sensorrich, providing information on the system response to control commands (in terms of the angular displacements of the control surface elements, velocity, pitch rate, roll rate, yaw rate, etc)

 As a result, a large amount of monitored data is available to the neural flight controller in real-time. In this situation, a data- driven approach to FDI is a feasible solution

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
The control actions in an aircraft are applied via aileron, elevator, rudder, and stabilizer. In addition, an aircraft using a neural flight controller can experience failures in the associated neural networks (e.g., improper tuning of the network parameters)

Faults in Aircraft Systems