Statistical stability and control analysis to investigate the control effort of improving handling quality characteristics

This paper presents a statistical stability and control analysis that takes into account the parameter uncertainty on the state-space representation of a system. The aim of the statistical analysis is to investigate how much control effort is required to improve the handling quality characteristics of a particular system during early design stages. In this context, this study enables to design a robust system from a control perspective by introducing an expression for the control effort. In this research, the control effort of a system is quantified by an evaluation criterion including the variability of the feedback gain matrices. The gain matrices in the statistical analysis are computed by a fixed notional control architecture, which is referred to as an evaluative controller in this paper. The proposed study is implemented on the longitudinal and lateral dynamics of a notional aircraft similar in size to a Boeing 747, and the results are presented.