Operational reliability assessment of an aircraft environmental control system

• Published in: Reliability engineering & system safety Vol. 94; no. 2; pp. 456 - 462
• Main Authors: Jenab, K., Rashidi, K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.02.2009; Elsevier
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Exact sciences and technology; Flow-graph; Human errors; Hybrid warm–cold standby system; Maintenance optimization; Operational research and scientific management; Operational research. Management science; Reliability theory. Replacement problems; Flow-graph; Human errors; Hybrid warm–cold standby system; Maintenance optimization; Rupture; Hybrid warm-cold standby system; Maintenance; Failures; Modeling; Graph flow; Optimization; Environmental control; Hybrid system; Human error; Airplane; Standby system; Break up time; Transition state; Data models; Reliability; Aircraft
• ISSN: 0951-8320; 1879-0836
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2008.05.003

The aircraft environmental control system (ECS) is composed of several non-identical and non-dedicated subsystems working as warm–cold standby subsystems. Also, their state transition times are arbitrary distributed. This paper presents a flow-graph-based method to calculate time-to-failure data and failure probability of the ECS. The obtained data from the model may be used for maintenance optimization that employs the failure limit strategy for ECS. The model incorporates detectable failures such as hardware failures, critical human errors, common-cause failures, maintenance categories, and switch activation methods. A numerical example is also presented to demonstrate the application of the model.