Safety Analysis of Longitunal Motion Controllers during Climb Flight

Safety Analysis of Longitunal Motion Controllers during Climb Flight

Article's language
English
Abstract
During the climb flight of big passenger planes, the pilot directly adjusts the pitch elevator and the plane reacts on this by changing its pitch angle. However, if the pitch angle becomes too large, the plane is in danger of an airflow disruption on the wings, which can cause the plane to crash. In order to prevent this, modern planes take advantage of control software to limit the pitch angle. However, if the software is poorly designed and if system designers have forgotten that sensors might yield wrong data, the software might cause the pitch angle to become negative, so that the plane loses height and can - eventually - crash. In this paper, we investigate on a model for a Boeing passenger plane how the control software could look like. Based on our model described in MatLab/Simulink, it is easy to see based on simulation that the plane loses height when the sensor for the pitch angle provides wrong data. For the opposite case of a correctly functioning sensor, our simulation does not indicate any problems. This simulation, however, is not a guarantee that the control is indeed safe. For this reason, we translated the MatLab/Simulink-model of the controller into a hybrid program in order to make this system amenable to formal verification using the theorem prover KeYmaera
DOI
10.31144/si.2307-6410.2019.n14.p11-18
Pages
11-18
File
Number