Comment by cpgxiii

Comment by cpgxiii 4 days ago

0 replies

In some cases, it is exactly the case of multiple independent actuators, such that the "voting" is effectively performed by the physical mechanism of the control surface.

In other cases all of the subsystems implement the comparison logic and "vote themselves out" if their outputs diverge from the others. A lot of aircraft control systems are structured more as primary/secondary/backup where there is a defined order of reversion in case of disagreement, rather than voting between equals.

But, more generally, it is very hard to eliminate all possible single points of failure in complex control systems, and there are many cases of previously unknown failure points appearing years or decades into service. Any sort of multi-drop shared data bus is very vulnerable to common failures, and this is a big part of the switch to ethernet-derived switched avionics systems (e.g. Afdx) from older multi-drop serial busses.