A model based approach to design for reliability and safety of critical aeronautic systems

This paper explores how the safety engineering practices applied to the aircraft design can be effectively associated to the MBSE. Requirements and procedures of the ARP4754/ED-79 and ARP4761 were considered. As an example the fuel system of a civil aircraft was used. Some key issues were found relevant, whilst modeling the system through the MBSE tools. The management of both the functional and dysfunctional analysis, leading to the Functional Hazard Analysis (FHA) of the whole aircraft, within the same modeling environment was tested. The elicitation of safety requirements with a direct link to the FTA and FMEA used to quantify the risk of failure was performed. The software tools which can be interoperated for those tasks were tested. As a result, the integration between the two above mentioned analyses looks fairly easy. In fact, further efforts are required to make fully interoperable the tools currently available to perform this activity and to include the human interaction with the analyzed system