Integrity monitoring of flight parameters using analytical redundancy

Along the trends of aircraft automation, model-based fault detection and isolation concept has gained increasing consideration in complex piloting and navigation avionics systems over the past two decades. While catastrophic or hard over failures can be uncovered rapidly by online built-in-testing, the more drifting type failures can only be detected by the use of more sophisticated techniques, based on the modern estimation/decision theory. The paper describes the status of an on-going research to develop a hierarchical redundancy management concept for fault monitoring in the electronic flight instrument system of the new generation civil aircraft. The work presented is related only to the task of fault detection and isolation. The paper outlines the main features of the proposed approach, and describes the two-level monitoring system. Finally, a simulation result to illustrate how the monitoring system handles a failure situation is presented