A decentralized fault-tolerant scheme for flight control applications

We present a new decentralized failure detection and identification (FDI) and adaptive reconfigurable control (ARC) scheme that is well suited for achieving the desired flight performance in the presence of multiple control effector failures that occur at different times. The failures include lock-in-place and hard-over. The problem of stable control reconfiguration in the presence of such failures is solved using a decentralized scheme employing multiple adaptive FDI observers and controllers and a suitably chosen decision-making mechanism. All the parameters can be estimated rapidly and the observers can be modified online to reflect the new operating regime following the failure. This enables fast FDI and effective ARC in the case of subsequent failures. The stability of the overall decentralized FDI-ARC system is demonstrated using the Lyapunov method, while the approach is illustrated through numerical simulations of the F-18 aircraft carrier landing maneuver.