Evolutionary Algorithms for Robust Cessna Citation X Flight Control

The main goal of this flight control system is to achieve good performance with acceptable flying quality within the specified flight envelope while ensuring robustness for model variations, such as mass variation due to fuel burn.

The Cessna Citation X aircraft linear model is presented for different flight conditions to cover the aircraft's flight envelope, on which a robust controller is designed using the H-infinity method optimized by two heuristic algorithms. The optimal controller was used to achieve satisfactory dynamic characteristics for the longitudinal and lateral stability control augmentation systems with respect to this aircraft's flying quality requirements. The weighting functions of the H-infinity method were optimised by using both genetic and differential evolution algorithms. The evolutionary algorithms gave very good results. This is the first time these algorithms have been used in this form to optimize H-infinity controllers on a business aircraft, respecting both flying quality requirements and robustness criteria as objective functions and avoiding the use of other computationally complicated algorithms. The results for both linear and nonlinear models have been validated using new tools developed in this research.