A number of work programmes are investigating strategic research topics in the fields of systems and control law definition, safety and reliability, high integrity software and systems integration. The activities within the core work packages are outlined below together with some of the related programmes. These faults which occur operationally but cannot be reproduced during bench testing result in many unnecessary maintenance actions, delays and costs for operators. The UTC is analysing the impact of these technological advances on current and future requirements for centralised and distributed fault tolerant military and civil control systems. The goal of the work is to optimise the controller architecture design to meet conflicting practical requirements for reliability, cost, weight and certification.
Key goals are to enhance safety and availability.
In addition, guidance to Systems Engineers has been provided through the production of a System Designers Handbook. The aim of this programme is to improve Rolls-Royce's efficiency by reducing development time. This takes into account commercial needs, such as certification constraints, to provide practical solutions that have a real cost benefit. The aim of this work is to develop a suite of steady state models of power equipment for performance monitoring and optimisation purposes aimed primarily at the power generation sector, but not neglecting the needs of the transmission and distribution and materials handling sectors. Genetic algorithms are being used to tune the models to reflect actual plant performance in commissioning and to adapt the models in-line with performance changes due to environmental and ageing effects.