Fault Tolerance and Vehicle Health Management (FT/VHM) processes and technologies are becoming increasingly important in answering some of the PMAD needs, problems and requirement issues generated by today's programs and customers.
Presently launch vehicle system customer needs are for solutions which provide ultra-reliability, high density, robust performance, efficient testability and operability, and most importantly, cost effectiveness. Any solution to these needs must improve or eliminate problems of the current systems as well as minimizing the introduction of new ones. Requirements derived from baseline system mission performance and payload constraints, vehicle checkout and launch operations, and military / range safety compliance's must be maintained and recognized to bound the solution process.
In order to apply FT/VHM processes and technologies, goals must be established based on the needs, problems, requirements and baseline system definitions. These goals are used to evaluate different fault tolerance and health management approaches based on time / criticality, event functions, fault containment regions, error containment, fault coverage and other baseline attributes.
This paper intends to present the views of candidate future Air Force, NASA, and project launch vehicle PMAD needs, problems and requirements. Followed by definitions of FT/VHM approaches to PMAD system design including: Theoretical, Practical, Analytical, Design and Tool considerations. Concluding with an example of an application of these processes to a launch vehicle fault tolerant avionics power system development.