Integrating Prognostics in Automated Contingency Management Strategies for Advanced Aircraft Controls, Phase I

Impact Technologies, in collaboration with Georgia Institute of Technology, proposes to develop and demonstrate innovative technologies to integrate prognostics into Automated Contingency Management (ACM) for advanced aircraft controls. Without consideration of prognostic information, the traditional reactive fault tolerant control approaches may fail to provide optimal fault mitigation/accommodation strategies over a longer period of time. The project team will create a platform level simulation environment that demonstrates the fault propagation from the component level, using electromechanical flight actuators (EMAs) as a testbench problem, to the high level flight envelope and mission objectives. The proposed ACM system accepts input from discrete diagnostics, grayscale diagnostics and prognostic modules and will be split into a real-time reactive component and a "planning" component that considers temporal parameters and the potential impact of being proactive with mitigating action. Specifically, innovative prognostics enhanced stochastic programming and receding horizon control techniques are proposed for high and low level ACM controllers respectively. A subset of core algorithms will be implemented on embedded systems and used in hardware-in-the-loop demonstrations to justify a Technology Readiness Level of 4.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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