Holistic Operability Projection during Early Aircraft Design

Overview & Synopsis

Aircraft operational performance is one of the key drivers to airline profitability and punctuality. Along with safety and technical performance, aircraft operational performance needs to be projected from the early stages of development to design an aircraft that can fully meet the expectations of airlines and passengers. The ability of a system to meet its operational requirements in terms of reliability, availability and costs is termed as ‘Operability’. This paper proposes a method to model the operability of an aircraft during early design and use it to predict its operational performance. Initially, in-service data is used to create a reference baseline for a system of interest. For a new design, the designers evaluate the changes (deltas) in terms of few high-level metrics from an operations point of view called Consolidated Operability Metrics. An operability model is developed using Bayesian networks that is then used to project the changes in operational performance of the new design in comparison to the baseline. This method will help aircraft architects in conducting trade-off studies during early design from an operational point of view.