Safety Assessment of Transport Aircraft Heavy Equipment Airdrop: An Improved STPA-BN Mechanism

Abstract

Aviation safety has been an eternal theme, and safety assessment is taken as the important method to assess the aircraft safety, but it is difficult to assess the safety of a heavy equipment airdrop from a transport aircraft due to mission complexity and strong coupling. This study uses an improved STPA-BN methodology to assess the safety of transport aircraft heavy equipment airdrop. To this purpose, qualitative safety analysis is performed by STPA, and then quantitative safety assessment is performed by BN. In contrast to the-state-of-the-art, the distinguishing feature of the proposed design lies in the introduction of DS evidence theory, which makes the probability of nodes in BN a <i>priori</i>. More precisely, best-worst multi-criteria decision-making method (BWM) is skillfully incorporated into the DS evidence theory so as to tackle the conflict issue that exists in most existing designs. Importance analysis is utilized to determine the importance of the different risk nodes. A case of transport aircraft heavy equipment airdrop mission is used to test the effectiveness of the proposed method.