A redundancy-based strategy for safety management in a modern civil aircraft

This paper describes the status of on-going research to develop a highly reliable redundancy-based system for integrity monitoring and the supervision of in-flight systems. The approach takes advantage of the on-board analytical and information redundancy, computer technology and graphics displays to meet the main goals of increasing safety, rapid recognition of out-of-tolerance conditions and improved crew awareness and workload. The proposed monitoring system is based on a network of cross-checks and a bank of extended Kalman filters associated with a decision test. The existing software and hardware environment can be used directly by the proposed techniques, thus avoiding loss of past investments. Evaluation results based on a typical landing approach scenario of the RCAM(1) (Research Civil Aircraft Model) benchmark illustrate the potential of the proposed approach. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.