St. Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation (GUAP), together with the scientific center "State Research Institute of Aviation Systems" (GosNIIAS) and Voronezh State University (VSU), are working on an intelligent aircraft control system.
The on-board distributed information computing environment (ODICE) will help pilots make decisions and, if necessary, even replace the second pilot.
ODICE is part of the strategic project Aerospace R&D Centre of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia's Priority-2030 program. The team is developing it on a domestic hardware and software component base in accordance with national standards. GUAP scientists have already created an ODICE prototyping stand. There, based on an expert system for preparing and making decisions, they implemented a system for analyzing events on board.
ODICE is based on a deterministic optical network, a stack of exchange protocols, and an artificial intelligence system based on an expert system for preparing and making decisions. The created standard may in the future become the main one for data exchange on board aircraft, where reliability, high speeds, and real-time operation are required.
The technology will ensure the versatility of reconfiguration and flexible adaptation of ODICE to all aircraft operating conditions, including emergency situations.
In the future, the developed technology will allow creating a real-time system that will help pilots make decisions or replace the second pilot, including in emergency situations. Its further development will not only reduce the number of emergency situations, but also significantly increase the efficiency of aircraft, reduce their weight, improve the equipment used, and apply new services on board that were previously impossible to implement.
The developers are considering the possibility of introducing ODICE groundwork on board as part of the research and development work on the development of a new generation Russian supersonic civil aircraft "Strizh".
Individual elements of this installation have already been patented, GosNIIAS has a patent for the principles of data transmission. GUAP, in turn, prepared a draft national state standard for the data transmission protocol.
It is expected that ODICE will reduce the weight of aircraft, get rid of copper cable connections, and ensure the simultaneous operation of a large number of on-board systems and their software applications.
In addition, it is obvious that ODICE can reduce the assembly time of equipment for large passenger aircraft. For example, according to Rostec, it takes fifteen days to assemble the on-board cable network for one MC-21 aircraft at the Irkutsk Aviation Plant of the UAC.
Twenty people do this work manually to ensure that even the smallest section of the wiring is checked - this is the world practice. During these fifteen days, workers assemble more than 70 kilometers of cable network. There are enough wires on the MC-21 to wrap the Third Transport Ring of Moscow twice.
