Effectiveness and robustness of an independent flight control law monitor

Electronic Flight Control Systems (EFCS) are essential parts of modern aircraft. Due to their safety-critical nature and complexity, EFCS must have the highest levels of dependability and availability. For certification, EFCS must undergo an extensive development process that includes proof of extreme improbability of catastrophic failures, extreme redundancy of hardware, and proven development processes that include the verification and validation of flight control laws. However, development errors are impossible to eliminate completely. For example, an incomplete or erroneous requirement set is likely to be a root cause of a development failure. A typical scenario is when a single requirement set is responsible for both the flight control laws and their

corresponding software, resulting in a possible undetected single point failure stemming from the requirement set. An independent design can be employed to eliminate this scenario. This design is independent of the flight control law requirements and is responsible for detecting critical safety failures without producing non-critical failures. The monitor’s design must strike a balance between the identified failures and the unexplained failures. For evaluation purposes, there are several performance metrics that are used, and a commercial aircraft flight control law simulator is used to develop the mechanical model of the aircraft. This model is used to test the various operational maneuvers to evaluate the performance of the monitor.

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