Design considerations in Boeing 777 fly-by-wire computers

Author

Yeh, Y.C.

Author_Institution

Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Seattle, WA, USA

fYear

1998

fDate

13-14 Nov 1998

Firstpage

64

Lastpage

72

Abstract

The new technologies in flight control avionics systems selected for the Boeing 777 airplane program consist of the following: fly-by-wire (FBW), the ARINC 629 data bus, and deferred maintenance. The FBW must meet extremely high levels of functional integrity and availability. The heart of the FBW concept is the use of triple redundancy for all hardware resources: the computing system, airplane electrical power, hydraulic power and communication paths. The multiple redundant hardware is required to meet the numerical safety requirements. Hardware redundancy can be relied upon only if hardware faults can be contained; fail-passive electronics are necessary building blocks for the FBW systems. In addition, the FBW computer architecture must consider other fault tolerance issues: generic errors, common mode faults, near-coincidence faults and dissimilarity

Keywords

aircraft computers; aircraft control; aircraft maintenance; computer architecture; fault tolerant computing; redundancy; safety; system buses; ARINC 629 data bus; Boeing 777 aeroplane; airplane electrical power; availability; common mode faults; communication paths; computer architecture; deferred maintenance; design considerations; dissimilarity; fail-passive electronics; fault tolerance; flight control avionics systems; fly-by-wire computers; functional integrity; generic errors; hardware faults; hardware resources; hydraulic power; multiple redundant hardware; near-coincidence faults; numerical safety requirements; triple redundancy; Aerospace control; Aerospace electronics; Airplanes; Availability; Computer architecture; Fault tolerance; Hardware; Heart; Redundancy; Safety;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

High-Assurance Systems Engineering Symposium, 1998. Proceedings. Third IEEE International

Conference_Location

Washington, DC

Print_ISBN

0-8186-9221-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HASE.1998.731596

Filename

731596