Boolean Safety Evaluation for Flight Display Architectures
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current methods for evaluating the security of operation in complex systems, such as flight information display systems, are inadequate as they often fail to account for security constraints early in the design and production phases, leading to imperfect safety assessments and potential hazards.
Innovation Solution
A method for evaluating operating safety by constructing boolean expressions to identify and quantify failures in functional and physical architectures, allowing for the identification of critical failure scenarios and their probabilities, which can be used to enhance system design and prevent feared events.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If security of operation constraints are evaluated during late stage in design and production, then the system can be produced with existing design, but the security constraints are imperfectly taken into account placing the system in danger
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by evaluating security of operation constraints during the specification and functional architecture definition phases, rather than at late stages. This allows security constraints to be incorporated into the initial design, preventing critical malfunctions before they occur while avoiding costly redesigns later in the production cycle
2Reliability
If security constraints are taken into account early in design phases, then system safety is improved, but it becomes difficult and costly to modify the initial design
Solution Approach 1:
The evaluation method is performed during the specification and functional architecture definition phases, which are early in the design process. This timing allows security constraints to be incorporated before detailed design and production, avoiding costly modifications while ensuring system safety from the outset
3Measurement precision
If failure tree analysis with minimal cuts is used to identify critical scenarios, then feared events can be identified, but the complexity of constructing and analyzing failure trees increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces the complex manual failure tree construction and minimal cut analysis with an automated computer-implemented method. The computer automatically generates the evaluation model, identifies feared events, and performs the analysis, eliminating the manual complexity while maintaining precise identification of critical scenarios and feared events
Data Source
AI summary
Evaluating the operating safety of a complex software and or hardware system such as a system for displaying flight information on an instrument panel of an aircraft. The evaluation method includes construction of a first architecture of the system, divided into several blocks each comprising data inputs/outputs, the inputs of a block being connected to the outputs of other blocks in the first architecture; identification of failures of the outputs of the blocks of the architecture; construction of first boolean expressions expressing the states of the outputs of the blocks of the first architecture as a function of the states of the identified failures, of the states of the inputs of the blocks; definition of a first feared event to be examined by a second boolean expression constructed based on the first boolean expressions; and reduction of the second boolean expression in a sum of monomials.