Reliability assessment for self-repairing flight control systems

It is pointed out that by using aerodynamically redundant control surfaces a flight control system can be reconfigured in the event of actuator failure and/or surface damage. This feature is usually implemented through the use of an impairment detection, isolation, and accommodation (IDIA) scheme. The authors report two aspects of new development in reliability assessment for such self-repairing flight control systems. The first is the incorporation of the IDIA performance through coverage into the system reliability computation. The second is the establishment of a simple theory for obtaining accurate reliability predictions without having to use Markov chain models. As a result of applying these methods to an aircraft model, one can recommend how much improvement is needed in designing its reconfigurable control system, and where its hardware reduction can be further made