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Complex systems such as satellites, aircrafts, automobiles and air traffic controls are becoming increasingly complex and highly integrated as prescribed by the SAE ARP 4754 Standard. They integrate many technologies and they work in very demanding environments sometimes with little or no maintenance due to the severe conditions of operation. To survive such harsh operating conditions, they require very high levels of reliability, to be reached by a diversity of approaches, processes, components, etc. By their turn, the processes of analysis and decision making shall be improved progressively, as experience accumulates and suggests modifications and adaptations. According to this philosophy, in this work, we discuss a proposal for improving the results of the Reliability Analysis and FMEA/FMECA of the CBERS Satellite Program, conducted at the National Institute for Space Research-INPE, since 1987.

Switching controls are those that can switch between control or plant modes to perform their functions. They have the advantage of being simpler to design than an equivalent control system with a single mode. However, the transients between those modes can introduce steps or overshootings in the state variables, and this can degrade the performance or even damage the control or the plant. So, the smoothing of such transients is vital for their reliability and mantainability. This is can be of extreme importance in the aerospace and automotive fields, plenty of switchings between manual and autopilot modes via relays, or among gears via clutches, for example. In this work, we present a first strategy for smoothing transients in switching controls of aerospace and automotive systems.