Advanced Cockpit-Systems Integration

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Advanced Cockpit-Systems Integration

G. Roe

The present paper describes two major complementary activities funded by the United Kingdom Ministry of Defense which are being undertaken at the Brough site of British Aerospace. These studies are addressing the problem of pilots task optimisation and the overall system architecture needed to meet the operational requirements of the next tactical combat aircraft. These activities are the Advanced Cockpit Design Studies and the Tactical Combat Aircraft Avionic Demonstrator Rig. The Advanced Cockpit Studies have been underway for some 6 years. The scope of these studies has been extensive, covering escape system design, g' alleviation techniques, advance pilot and equipment cooling techniques, information and control task rationalization and the development of workload prediction and measurement technqiues. The studies have after a number of iterations culminated in the development of a dynamic cockpit mockup. The studies specifically related to the information and control task rationalization will be discussed in this paper in some detail. The Tactical Combat Aircraft Avionic Demonstrator Rig is presently at the mid point of a 3-4 year evolutionary design programme investigating such topics as, total system integration, standardisation of interfaces, effective sub-system inter communication, graceful degradation of the system and improved maintenance procedures. The architecture being developed has a multi bus hierarchy and implements the 'data' transmission standard 1553B for sub system to sub system and bus to bus communications.