ONBASS - Onboard Active Safety System
General Project Presentation
The aim of the ONBASS project is to propose,
analyse and develop the innovative Principle for Active System Safety
(PASS) for aviation. Rather than just recording data during an
aircraft's flight, in order to allow post-crash analysis to be
carried-out, ONBASS proposes the analysis of available data in real
time DURING the flight and reacting on them with the aim of accident
PREVENTION. First, ONBASS is concerned with the formulation of the
theoretical principles of aviation system safety: flight safety (risk)
model, information flow model and control system model. These models
make it possible to determine the scope of the applicability of ONBASS.
Subsequently, analysis of the dependencies within and between the
models will permit the definition of the features, functions and
structures of the system, software and hardware. A comparison between
the existing and the proposed system structure of aviation safety will
be drawn-up with the aim of optimising the project\u2019s outcomes.
To match this demand the scope of ONBASS is the following:
1. Further theoretical and conceptual development of the active safety
principle and formation of theoretical models to analyse the limits of
the principle's applicability
2. Research and development of basic fault tolerant hardware elements
for the on-board part of the active safety system
3. Concepts, design and development of a resilient system software core
for the active safety system
In terms of the system software the main characteristics of ONBASS will
be extremely high reliability, fault tolerant concurrency,
recoverability of processed data, support mechanisms for real time
fault detection, system reconfiguration in case of hardware fault or
degradation, high performance and hard real time scheduling. In terms
of system hardware the main characteristics of ONBASS will be highest
possible reliability, recoverability, fault tolerance, thermal and
vibration resistance and survivability and graceful mechanical
degradation.
iRoC Participation in the Project
iRoC is involved in the hardware development of
the ONBASS devices.
Based on the initial specifications we have proposed an architecture
that implements the functions that the device must provide. As fault
tolerance and reliability are important aspects, we have conducted a
study aiming at improving our knowledge in the fields of reliability of
electronic devices at flight altitudes.
Using the results of the study, we have proposed and implemented a
system-wide fault tolerant hardware architecture that copes with chip
failures and component-specific error detecting and correcting
techniques.
We have then manufactured a hardware device (the black box in the
figure) that implements the proposed architecture.
