Ranking the Vulnerable Components of Aircraft by Considering Performance Degradations

Abstract

One of the most important tasks of aircraft vulnerability assessment is to rank vulnerable components so that proper actions can be applied to the weaker components to improve survivability. Currently, when comparing the contributions of components to the overall aircraft vulnerability in a military context, existing methods focused on the aircraft kill state without considering the intermediate states that are related to performance degradations. This work aims to investigate how performance-related importance measures in the field of reliability can be modified to rank the vulnerable components. Component vulnerability importance measures considering performance degradations are proposed. Two applications, one with eight critical components and one consisting of 84 noncritical components and 28 critical components dealing with aircraft being hit by metallic fragments detonated from a missile, are provided. The analysis shows that the proposed method is useful for engineers to determine which components are more likely to cause aircraft performance degradations in the combat environment from the standpoint of vulnerability.

Some extensions of the component maintenance priority

“…Fig. 1 illustrates the components of the aircraft system [5,38], which has 30 critical components, as listed in Table 1. Among these major components, we have four types of redundant components as follows.…”

Vulnerability-driven multi-objective topological optimization of aircraft protections

“…The FASTGEN software implemented a shotline-based procedure, which, when used as input for the COVART software, enabled the determination of critical indices in the vulnerability assessment framework, as extensively explained in ref. [9,10]. It is worth noting that the shotline-based procedure employed in FASTGEN software has roots in the consolidated Ray-Tracing algorithms.…”

Performance Degradation Based on Importance Change and Application in Dissimilar Redundancy Actuation System

“…Zhang et al [26] propose an importance-based maintenance priority model to guide the selection of preventive maintenance components, in order to minimize the expected maintenance cost of the system. These importance measure indicators are used in several fields, such as the electronics industry, aerospace and oil exploration [27][28][29], for example.…”