An Integrated Framework for Identification, Classification, and Assessment of Aviation Systems Hazards

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated framework to identify, classify, and assess hazards in complex systems such as the civil aviation system. The methodology employs a model-based systems approach to hazard analysis and integrates various related perspectives of system safety, hazard analysis, and risk analysis. As a causal model the methodology provides a vehicle for identification and communication of cause-effect relations including those associated with human, organization, and system hardware and software, and physical and regulatory environment of the system. The proposed methodology extends the conventional risk analysis techniques, e.g., Event Sequence Diagrams (ESD) Fault Trees (FT) by introducing a hybrid causal model (HCM) of FTs and Influence Diagrams (ID). ESDs are used to define context within which various causal factors could be viewed as hazard. The enumeration of the causes of ESD initiators and intermediate events is done through the hybrid logic (HCM) where the deterministic causes such as direct hardware, software, and human failure events are handled by FT logic gates while probabilistic causal relations such impact of organizational factor are treated with IDs or Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN).