Health-Management Driven Control Reconfiguration Approach for Flight Vehicles

There are, thus, two subproblems to the reconfiguration: (a) an adaptive control problem at the lower level to extend component life and derive new component performance limits, and (b) a supervisory control problem at the higher level to adapt the system controller to maximize system capability while respecting the performance limitations. Since our reconfiguration occurs in the context of a dynamic system, we need to respect the stability implications of the reconfiguration.

To address this, we apply bandwidth analyses at the component level and the systems level in a robust performance context. A conservative criterion for stability is to impose rate limits for reconfiguration that insure that undesired, and possibly unmodeled, modes of behavior are not driven by reconfiguration activities. For specific hardware, extensions beyond this conservative approach may be warranted (e.g. to catch faulty behavior) and validated on a case-by-case basis, essentially by extending the component modeling to include a model of behavior under certain types of reconfiguration.