Case studies for prognostics-enhanced Automated Contingency Management for aircraft systems

This paper presents several case studies for using prognostic information in the design of fault tolerant control solutions for flight critical aircraft systems. A hierarchical Automated Contingency Management (ACM) architecture that allows fault accommodation and mitigation at various levels in the system ranging from component level control reconfiguration, system level control reconfiguration, to high level mission re-planning is introduced and illustrated with three case studies, one for each level. Incorporating prognostics in ACM system allows not only fault accommodation, but also failure mitigation via proper control actions based on short term prognosis, and moreover, the establishment of a long term operational plan that optimizes the utility of the entire system based on long term prognostics. The proactive ACM concept and architecture presented in this paper are applicable to many advanced autonomous systems such as deep space probes, unmanned autonomous vehicles, satellites, military and commercial aircrafts.