Active fault-tolerant control system vs Model Reference Adaptive Control system: Performance comparison on flight systems

Modern avionic systems are still designed based only on the sensors' measurements, without considering actuator fault scenarios. Acting on several control surfaces, actuators are considered as critical components and therefore, failed actuators can lead to undesirable consequences as degrade performances or even loss of stability during flight. To handle this problem, actuator hardware redundancy has been used for many years ago. However, this technique is expensive and involves increased weight and space. Therefore, new control approaches, based on the online actuator fault diagnosis and fault effect compensation, are developed to deal with these disadvantages. These approaches are known in the literature as fault-tolerant flight control systems. In this paper, a fault-tolerant flight control system is designed and applied to the linear lateral motion of the Boeing 747. Numerical simulations are performed to compare its performance and effectiveness with existing approaches. FlightGear software simulator is used to show the behavior of the aircraft on a graphical user interface.