arXiv subjects

Chams Eddine Mballo

Publications and source records attributed to Chams Eddine Mballo.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Characterization and Analysis of Emergency Landing Flight Envelopes with Graded Safety Specifications

Emergency landing flight envelope analysis traditionally adopts a binary notion of safety, whereby a trajectory is safe only if state constraints are satisfied pointwise in time. In practice, ensuring a successful landing requires recognizing that aircraft operation spans a continuum in the state space from the nominal to the critical regime. Between these regimes lies a degraded regime of states outside nominal operation that may be visited only for limited durations. Safety is therefore inherently graded, in the sense that limited exposure to degraded states may be tolerated, and must be assessed using a trajectory-dependent criterion rather than a purely pointwise-in-time one. This paper develops a Hamilton-Jacobi reachability framework for analyzing emergency landing flight envelopes under this graded notion of safety. Safety is encoded through a soft constraint defined by a designer-specified continuous violation cost function that assigns zero cost in the nominal regime and larger cost to more safety-critical off-nominal states. We introduce a general class of state- and time-dependent violation cost functions and establish monotonicity and continuity properties that characterize how the flight envelope varies with the cost of off-nominal operation. These results provide a principled sensitivity analysis linking safety conservativeness to operational capability. Building on this analysis, we propose a synthesis algorithm for parameterized violation cost functions in this class. The algorithm provably converges to the least conservative parameter under which a prescribed off-nominal safety requirement is satisfied. Numerical results for a fixed-wing emergency landing scenario under propulsion failure demonstrate the sensitivity properties and validate the algorithm.

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arXiv2025

A Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability Framework with Soft Constraints for Safety-Critical Systems

Traditional reachability methods provide formal guarantees of safety under bounded disturbances. However, they strictly enforce state constraints as inviolable, which can result in overly conservative or infeasible solutions in complex operational scenarios. Many constraints encountered in practice, such as bounds on battery state of charge in electric vehicles, recommended speed envelopes, and comfort constraints in passenger-carrying vehicles, are inherently soft. Soft constraints allow temporary violations within predefined safety margins to accommodate uncertainty and competing operational demands, albeit at a cost such as increased wear or higher operational expenses. This paper introduces a novel soft-constrained reachability framework that extends Hamilton-Jacobi reachability analysis for the formal verification of safety-critical systems subject to both hard and soft constraints. Specifically, the framework characterizes a subset of the state space, referred to as the soft-constrained reach-avoid set, from which the system is guaranteed to reach a desired set safely, under worst-case disturbances, while ensuring that cumulative soft-constraint violations remain within a user-specified budget. The framework comprises two principal components: (i) an augmented-state model with an auxiliary budget state that tracks soft-constraint violations, and (ii) a regularization-based approximation of the discontinuous Hamilton-Jacobi value function associated with the reach-avoid differential game studied herein. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated through numerical examples involving the landing of a simple point-mass model and a fixed-wing aircraft executing an emergency descent, both under wind disturbances. The simulation results validate the framework's ability to simultaneously manage both hard and soft constraints in safety-critical settings

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arXiv2025

Load Limiting Control for Component Life Extension

This paper presents the development of a novel life-extending control scheme for critical helicopter components subjected to significant fatigue loading. The primary objective is to synthesize a more efficient and less conservative life-extending control scheme than those currently available in the literature. The proposed Load Limiting Control (LLC) scheme is a viable solution that addresses several issues that current life-extending control schemes suffer from, such as the neglect of fatigue damage induced by the harmonic component of loads and the inability to distinguish between aggressive and non-aggressive maneuvers. The proposed LLC scheme treats desired harmonic load limits as limit boundaries and recasts the problem of load limiting as a vehicle limit by computing a Control Margin (CM) using a limit detection and avoidance module. The computed CM is used as a cue to the pilot. The limit detection and avoidance module comprises an optimization algorithm, a model predictive controller, and a computationally simple on-board dynamical model. Simulations were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the LLC scheme in limiting harmonic pitch link loads during flight. One significant outcome is that, with sufficient training, the pilot can skillfully track the cue within 0.5 seconds of initiating the tracking task.

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