Integrated flight and propulsion control system design

Integrated control system design refers to the problem of controlling plants characterised by a partitioned architecture. Plants of this type can generally be broken down into various (possibly interacting) subsystems. These subsystems may have very different dynamic characteristics, and may be designed, manufactured and tested quite independently before being assembled into an overall system. Any overall control strategy must therefore be `partitioned´, in the sense that separate subcontrollers will be required to address different control specifications in different parts of the system, and `integrated´, in the sense that overall system performance objectives are achieved in the face of interactions between the various subsystems. Indeed it can be argued that the main difficulty in integrated control system design arises from the inevitable uncertainty in modelling the various subsystems and the interactions between them. The article compares a centralised approach and a hierarchical approach, and discusses their application to a STOVL aircraft