DISTRIBUTED AND RECONFIGURABLE ARCHITECTURE FOR FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEM

New airplanes must meet rigorous requirements of aviation safety, operational reliability, high performance and energy efficiency at a low cost. To meet this challenge, we should optimize current system and take advantage of available technology for the next decade. This work is aiming at proposing some evolutions for Flight Control System (FCS) and to build alternative FCS low-cost and safe architectures for the next decade with less hardware and software resources. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we will provide an incremental methodology to give guidelines for architecture optimization. Second, we will present a full distributed reconfigurable architecture for FCS based on smart actuators and digital communication network where all system functions are distributed to simplex Flight Control Computer (FCC) nodes and remote actuator electronics nodes (FCRM). Communication between FCC and FCRM will be based on Airbus embedded communication network (ADCN, Advanced Data Communication Network) [1] and a 1553 bus. We will use ALTARICA language to perform dependability evaluation at architectural level in order to check the effects and benefits of the new architecture on the dependability of FCS.