A Risk Analysis Study: Model Development for Risk Mitigation and Systematic Approach to FTI System Design Activities

Nowadays with the innovation in the aviation industry, air vehicle subsystems are getting more complicated, and the complexity of the aircraft sub-systems prompts flight test instrumentation (FTI) requirements to be able to acquire data from flight test campaigns for validation and verification of the developing sub-systems. The inadequacy of the traditional FTI activities for complicated data acquisition systems in terms of design, configuration and integration has triggered a new model which is in favor of creating a master measurand list (MML), selecting FTI equipment, preparing FTI requirements, creating software configuration index, engineering conversion formulas, system integration and functional tests. In this paper, performing a risk analysis of the traditional and proposed model regarding FTI activities shows that potential risks such as the immaturity of measurement requests, the complexity of the system, and the level of know/how and experience are reduced. Applying the proposed model to a master measurand list which allows users to analyze the whole measurand requirements more traceable and accurate while developing the design process has a considerable risk decrease. Furthermore, a systematic approach based on the test and evaluation (T&E) reference model and machine learning model supports the MML regarding project management such as duration, cost, schedule, and re-work.

I. Introduction

Huge volumes of data must be collected as part of testing activities related to large platforms. The flight test instrumentation (FTI) system is a vital system to acquire data during the flight test campaign. To be able to collect all required data, some components such as data acquisition units, network switches, recorders, digital buses, different analogue, and digital sensors, are needed to be integrated [1]. After that, hundreds of flight tests are performed during the development of aircraft systems. The main aim is to implement flight test activities, validating, verifying, and certifying the design after analysing the flight test data [2]. Instrumentation design engineers collect requests from systems engineers for platform sub-systems to determine data acquisition methods. Then, they evaluate these flight test instrumentation requests (FTIR) and provide their design with the corresponding requirement documents.