TTTech joins EU-project DRESS

TTTech has become a partner, with 13 leading actors of the European aerospace industry, in the DRESS project for research into "more electric" aircraft as well as automatic airport navigation.

The project aims to perform research, and to develop and validate a distributed and redundant electrical steering system for an aircraft nose landing gear. Coordinated by Messier-Bugatti, a world leader in aircraft braking, this project was selected by the European Commission as part of the 6th framework program for research and development.

The project kick-off took place in May 2006; project duration is planned for three years. DRESS stands for Distributed and Redundant Electrical nose gear Steering System. Its main goal is to replace current hydraulic actuators by electromechanical actuators and electronics. This will improve the industry's competitiveness and increase aircraft safety by reducing system weight.

Moreover, this approach will improve reliability because it will be possible to install additional redundancies, and it will lead to steering systems that can be integrated with fully automated aircraft ground guidance systems. TTTech's contribution will be focused on system architecture studies, data communication and advanced system integration technologies.

TTTech will build easily reconfigurable plug and play hardware and software modules for fault-tolerant, distributed embedded computing and networking. This will enable control system reuse among different aircraft platforms, reduction of certification effort, shorter development cycles, and reduced integration costs.

All TTTech solutions are based on a time-triggered approach that supports fault-tolerant computing. The Time-Triggered Protocol (TTP®) has been used in safety-critical production programs since 2002 and is being deployed in various next- generation aircraft.