Embedded Control and Software Development Technologies for Gas Turbine Engines

This paper presents the steps involved in developing safety critical embedded control software for aerospace applications for the control of propulsion system. The propulsion system control system must be designed to meet a basic set of operability requirements provide the expected performance without exceeding design limitations. Stringent configuration management and high level of coding standards in the code are required to meet the safety critical nature of propulsion control system. The various stages of control system development are requirement analysis, configuration management & traceability analysis, control system analysis, control system design, code generation, and verification and validation. Many of these steps are performed manually and using real hardware systems, resulting in high development cost and long development time with little or no re-use. For the past 10 years, Pratt and Whitney has taken steps to progressively automate several steps to reduce the development cost and achieve high level of re-use. Opportunities exist to further automate the development process with the use of model based development techniques and commercially available embedded control development tools.