Challenges in Building Fault -Tolerant Flight Control System for a Civil Aircraft

The civil aircraft's electrical flight control system has been changed to take benefit of technical improvements. New technologies, when mature, can be incorporated in aircrafts. Evolutions are considered towards a digital network between computers and actuators/sensors, and more distributed processing for actuators and sensors. Thus, new architectures are possible for future aircraft systems. The difficulty is to achieve the same safety and availability requirements with additional operational reliability (required by airlines). The challenge that faces the engineers is to design mass-produced fault-tolerant systems with reasonable cost. Analysis of existing electrical flight control system architectures of the Airbus and Boeing airplanes as well as future requirements drive us to introduce a brief overview for an incremental methodology of architectural design process based on progressive requirements injection.