Development of a workstation for the integrated design and simulation of flight control systems

The development of a workstation which integrates design, analysis, and simulation methods for flight control system synthesis is reported. Aerodynamic, propulsion, and structural models can be directly interfaced for analysis and synthesis work, and the results transferred to a flight simulator and to the dynamic structural model. The workstation is implemented with an executive which handles most input/output operations internally so that data management by the user is minimized. With an expert-aided approach, predicted handling qualities are used to evaluate the performance of the closed-loop system. A modular approach allows new techniques to be easily implemented as executives or as additional modules