Improving FDIR of Spacecraft Systems with Advanced Tools and Concepts

International audience; Faults in spacecraft systems are an important problem, mainly because of the cost of downtime, and because their remoteness makes maintenance more difficult. This is why automated handling of faults can greatly enhance the system overall performance. This automated fault management relies on dedicated functions for fault detection, identification, and recovery (FDIR), that are often interleaved with the system, which makes it difficult to guarantee tolerance with respect to a particular anomaly, and makes the system difficult to maintain as well. On the other hand, several advanced computational tools exist that are known to support the tasks of FDIR. In this paper, starting from the current state of affairs in spacecraft system development, we develop and test several options for enhancing the quality of FDIR functions. First, we use software validation and verification tools to prove that the FDIR functions meet some functional quality goals. A second option we explore is to re-implement FDIR functions by Model-Based Reasoning algorithms, that are guaranteed to produce exact results with respect to a model of the system’s behaviour. In each option, we use and compare several software tools, we compare the effort required to adapt, integrate and use them, and estimate the overall benefits theyprovide.