Abstract
In aircraft project management, reliability and maintainability are fundamental for ensuring system safety, for optimizing the manufacturing process and for improving assembly/disassembly operations when maintenance actions are required. The inclusion of such requirements helps to minimize life cycle costs, augments the residual lifetime of aircraft and consequently increases customer satisfaction. While most papers published in the aircraft engineering literature are rather evasive or do not accurately describe the role of reliability and maintainability (RM) methods in early design phases, this paper elucidates the problem. This paper discusses various concepts such as design for reliability and risk assessment analysis for improving aircraft safety and reliability at the deployment stages. The article also focuses on how reliability prediction issues are addressed using various methods, tools and standards, such as failure modes and effect analysis, fault tree analysis and guidelines such as MIL-STD-217f and ARP4754. Finally, this paper demonstrates that reliability is crucial to consider in all phases of the life cycle of an aircraft.
Highlights
The airline industry continues to grow and thrive, with a forecasted 3.3 billion passengers traveling in 2014 [1]
The Airbus A320 is a “very reliable” aircraft according to Alain Vanalderweireldt, President of the Belgian Cockpit Association (BeCA), who stated this following the crash of a German airline Germanwings flight in the French Alps [27] [28]
Another interesting approach has been proposed by Suhir [19] and concerns design for reliability on the probabilistic basis (PdfR), which is theoretically based on the well-known concept of probabilistic risk analysis (PRA)
Summary
The airline industry continues to grow and thrive, with a forecasted 3.3 billion passengers traveling in 2014 [1]. One of the major challenges facing the aviation industry consists of reducing the design and production cycle time of an aircraft to the greatest extent possible with respect to three important aspects: speed of delivery to customers, quality and safety, and costs [4]-[7] To satisfy their requirement to deliver aircraft at specified contractual times, Airbus and Boeing rely on multiple networks of regional and international facilities for design and engineering and for assembly of the expected aircraft [2] [8] [9]. The design algorithm is a list of tasks that are arranged in a certain order exactly as a classical project execution plan as if it were a computer program Such an example is presented in Altfeld [4] and Gudmundsson [8].
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