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.
