AIRBUS efforts towards advanced real-time Fault Diagnosis and Fault Tolerant Control

Abstract In this article the industrial goals and objectives of the European Framework 7th project termed “REconfiguration of CONtrol in Flight for Integral Global Upset Recovery (RECONFIGURE)” are presented. Commercial aircraft fault tolerant control (FTC) strategies in the flight control system (FCS) are based on fail-safe flight control law reconfiguration which relies on upstream hardware redundancy-based robust Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD). This industrial state-of-practice fits well in the current certification process but it also decreases the easiness of the piloting task as soon as the system level of degradation increases. Thus, the main goal of RECONFIGURE is to research and develop aircraft FDD and FTC technologies that facilitate the automated handling of off-nominal/abnormal events and optimize the aircraft status and flight. The article details the project description of work, from industrial benchmark (fault scenarios and aircraft model) up to industrial verification and validation (V&V) activities, via advanced FDD/FTC research and development. The expected results and perspectives are also presented.