Adoption of a Bayesian Network for the Operational Reliability Analysis of Aircraft Systems

To assess and analyze the operational reliability of aircraft systems, an aircraft system Bayesian network (ASBN) method is proposed with the functional and logical coupling relationship of aircraft components, which integrates the characteristics of components related to aircraft operation, is built for analyzing the operational reliability under considering the effect of stochastic features. The aircraft system operating reliability is first assessed by forward inference of ASBN. And the most likely failure component or subsystem under the appearance of different failure condition severity categories are identified. The results show that the aircraft system operating reliability is not as high as the reliability of its components; the most likely failure component or subsystem are those tightly connected to other components or subsystems. The efforts of this paper provide a useful way for deriving operational reliability analysis of complex systems.