Evaluation of Optimization Methods for Control Allocation

The performanceand computational requirements ofoptimization methodsfor control allocation areevaluated. Two control allocation problems are formulated: a direct allocation method that preserves the directionality of the moment and a mixed optimization method that minimizes the error between the desired and the achieved momentsaswellasthecontroleffort.Theconstrainedoptimizationproblemsaretransformedinto linearprograms so that they can be solved using well-tried linear programming techniques such as the simplex algorithm. A variety of techniques that can be applied for the solution of the control allocation problem in order to accelerate computations are discussed. Performance and computational requirements are evaluated using aircraft models with different numbers of actuators and with different properties. In addition to the two optimization methods, three algorithms with low computational requirements are also implemented for comparison: a redistributed pseudoinverse technique, a quadratic programming algorithm, and a e xed-point method. The major conclusion is that constrained optimization can be performed with computational requirements that fall within an order of magnitude of those of simpler methods. The performance gains of optimization methods, measured in terms of the error between the desired and achieved moments, are found to be small on the average but sometimes signie cant.Avariety ofissuesthataffecttheimplementation ofthevariousalgorithmsin ae ight-controlsystem are discussed.