A Rule-Based System for Real-Time Analysis of Control Systems

An approach to automate the real-time analysis of flight critical health monitoring and system status is being developed and evaluated at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Dryden Flight Research Facility. A software package was developed in house and installed as part of the extended aircraft interrogation and display system. This design features a knowledge-base structure in the form of rules to formulate interpretation and decision logic of real-time data. This technique has been applied for ground verification and validation testing and flight test monitoring where quick, real-time, safety-of-flight decisions can be very critical. In many cases postprocessing and manual analysis of flight system data are not required. This paper describes the processing of real-time data for analysis and the output format, which features a message stack display. The development, construction, and testing of the rule-driven knowledge base, along with an application using the X-31A flight test program, are presented.