Advanced Diagnosis for Sustainable Flight Guidance and Control: The European ADDSAFE Project 2011-01-2804

The state-of-practice for aircraft manufacturers to diagnose guidance & control faults and obtain full flight envelope protection at all times is to provide high levels of dissimilar hardware redundancy. This ensures sufficient available control action and allows performing coherency tests, cross and consistency checks, voting mechanisms and built-in test techniques of varying sophistication. This hardware-redundancy based fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) approach is nowadays the standard industrial practice and fits also into current aircraft certification processes while ensuring the highest level of safety standards.

In the context of future “sustainable” aircraft (More Affordable, Smarter, Cleaner and Quieter), the Electrical Flight Control System (EFCS) design objectives, originating from structural loads design constraints, are becoming more and more stringent. The main issue is weight saving as this improves aircraft performance (e.g. consumption, noise, range) and consequently decreases its environmental footprint.

A consortium of European industrial partners, research establishments and Universities has been established with funding from the European Union 7th Framework Program (EU-FP7) to address the aforementioned challenge. The overall aim of the project, termed Advanced Fault Diagnosis for Sustainable Flight Guidance and Control (ADDSAFE), is to research and develop model-based FDD methods for aircraft flight control systems faults, predominantly sensor and actuator malfunctions. The importance of the studies performed within the project arises due to the industrial representativeness of the benchmark and fault problematic, indeed the final goal of the project is to validate the more promising designs in the actual Airbus flight control system verification and validation (V&V) setup: from high-fidelity simulation models to the Iron Bird, and including real aircraft actuator rigs.

This article presents the ADDSAFE project, covering its objectives as well as presenting the aircraft benchmark, fault scenarios and industrial V&V tools that will be used in the project.