Availability Assessment of Avionics Display System based on Fault Dependent Matrix

The avionics display system provides the safety-critical information (airspeed, altitude, etc.) for the crew. Loss of these information may lead to a catastrophic event, therefore it is necessary to assess their availability during the system design phase. For a civil aircraft, although analysis paths of different functional failure condition may be similar under the same system architecture, in the current industry, it is common to analyze each failure condition by establishing a fault tree. The fault dependent matrix is a model-based approach for safety analysis. This paper proposes an applying process based on fault dependent matrix and performs availability assessment for an avionics display system model based on the proposed process. The results show that the use of fault dependent matrix analysis can not only meet the needs of availability assessment, but also the efficiency of assessment.