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jpollock parent
The design of the system is very interesting, particularly how it expects to handle errors.

In 90's Telco, you used to have a pair of systems and if they disagreed, they would decide which side was bad and disable it.

In modern cloud, you accept there are errors. There's another request in ~10+ms. You only look when the error rate becomes commercially important.

My understanding of spacecraft is that there would be 3 independent implementations and they would vote.

The plane has a matrix of sensors and systems, allowing faults to be bubbled up and bad elements disabled independently.

The ADIRU does compare values to detect failures (median of 3 sensors), but they could only detect errors that last >1s. The flight computer used the raw data - because the sensors aren't interchangeable (they won't have consistent readings in all flight modes)!

Very nifty.

One thing, they say "memorisation period", I don't think it's a memorisation period? From my reading of the algorithm, it should be more "last value retention period"? Or "sensor spurious fault reading delay"?

Section 2.1 A330/A340 flight control system design "AOA computation logic"

https://www.atsb.gov.au/sites/default/files/media/3532398/ao...


jpollock OP
For example....

"Preliminary A330/A340 FCPC algorithm"

"The algorithm did not effectively manage a specific situation where AOA 2 and AOA 3 on one side of the aircraft were temporarily incorrect and AOA 1 on the other side of the aircraft was correct, resulting in ADR 1 being rejected."

So, you've got a system where _two_ of the three sensors are bad, and you need to deal with it.

Loudergood
I'm in awe of the fact that two sensors can be wrong AND agree with each other.
Nextgrid
Those being analog sensors measuring analog, physical things, they will never exactly agree with each other; so there's a plausibility window. As long as the fault causes the sensors to remain within said window they will be considered as valid.
UltraSane
It is just like having range of values considered to be equal for floating point numbers.
rubatuga
Space computers are generally in 3 with a hot spare
sllabres
Space shuttle had five.

Four of them operating in a redundant set and the fifth performing non critical task, as descripted in [1]. The fifth is also programmed by a different contractor in a different programming language: #1-4 running the Primary Avionics Software System (PASS) programmed by IBM in HAL/S and #5 programmed by a different team of Rockwell International in assembly. [2]

[1] https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~uli/cs673/papers/RedundancyMa...

[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110014946/downloads/20...

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