Swarm Intelligence Based Reconfigurable Control Allocation

Modern aircrafts are configured with many control surfaces to enhance the reliability, maneuverability and survivability. To make full use of the redundant control surfaces and distribute the control power without exceeding the saturations, control allocation is introduced into the control system. An effective control re-allocation may achieve acceptable stability and performance in case of control surface failures. This paper presents a reconfigurable control allocation methodology by rebuilding and optimizing the control allocation matrix when control surface failures occur. The basic control allocation uses the modified weighted pseudo-inverse method. The particle swarm optimization is used to modify the parameters of the weighted matrix to enhance the volume of the attainable subset. To evaluate the ability of control re-allocation, partial loss of control effectiveness failures have been implemented into an application example. Simulation result shows that satisfactory results are achieved by the control re-allocation for accommodating the control surface failures.