Future architecture for flight control systems

The development of fault tolerant embedded control systems, such as flight control systems, FCS, is currently highly specialized and time consuming. We introduce a conceptual architecture for the next decade control system where all control and logic is distributed to a number of computer nodes locally linked to actuators and connected via a communication network. In this way we substantially decrease the lifecycle cost of such embedded systems and acquire scalable fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is based on redundancy and in our concept permanent faults are covered by hardware replication and transient faults, fault detection and processing by software techniques. With intelligent nodes and the use of inherent redundancy a robust and simple fault tolerant system is introduced with a minimum of both hardware and bandwidth requirements. The study is based on an FCS for JAS 39 Gripen, a multirole combat aircraft that is statically unstable at subsonic speed.