Over the past 30 years, safety-critical avionics systems such as Fly-By-Wire (FBW) flight controls, full-authority digital engine controls, and other systems have been introduced on many commercial and military airplanes and spacecraft. Early FBW systems, such as on the F-16 and Airbus A320, were considered revolutionary and introduced with extreme caution. These early systems and their successors all make use of redundant and fault-tolerant avionics to provide the required dependability and safety, but have used significantly different architectures. This paper examines the different levels of criticality and fault tolerance required by different types of avionics systems, establishes architectural categories of fault-tolerant architectures, and identifies the discriminating features of the varied approaches. Examples of discriminators include the level of redundancy, methods of engaging backup systems, protection from software errors, and the use of dissimilar hardware and software. The strengths and weaknesses of the approaches will be identified. The paper concludes with some speculation on trends for future systems based on this evaluation of previous systems.


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    Title :

    Design by extrapolation: an evaluation of fault tolerant avionics


    Contributors:
    Hammett, R. (author)


    Publication date :

    2002-04-01


    Size :

    711120 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Design by Extrapolation - An Evaluation of Fault-Tolerant Avionics

    Hammett, R. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2001





    Fault tolerant avionics

    HILLS, ANDY / MIRZA, NISAR | AIAA | 1988