Modeling guidelines and usage analysis towards applying HiP-HOPS method to airborne electrical systems

Abstract

Aircraft development process requires safety assessment to ensure aircraft continued airworthiness by guaranteeing that hazards related to aircraft functions are properly addressed. Safety analyses require increasingly more reliable and efficient solutions, particularly for complex and highly integrated aircraft systems. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is a safety technique broadly applied in aerospace industry. The generation of fault trees can be facilitated by using the HiP-HOPS method proposed by Dr. Yiannis Papadopoulos. HiP-HOPS supports semi-automatically generation of fault trees based on system architectural model and annotations regarding system failure modes. In this paper, we investigate the usage of HiP-HOPS method in airborne electrical systems. We propose modeling guidelines, in order to help engineers and analysts to build system models more suitable to the application of HiP-HOPS. We apply both HiP-HOPS and guidelines in a case study and evaluate HiP-HOPS applicability using criteria as acceptability, suitability and practicality.