Aircraft Vulnerability Modeling
Summary
The team was faced with a major delivery to a customer for a critical milestone in one aircrafts products design lifecycle. Every milestone required, per contract, our team to send the entirety of our aircraft vulnerability model and a report that documented the model assumptions. and results. With little time remaining, a few novel ideas were introduced by me to aid in submitting the model with high accuracy, low run time, and allow us to submit the model and report on time. Our model and report received high praise by the customer.
Novel Methods
The overall problem our team was tasked with was to calculate the probability of “kill”, given a hit by a threat. The criteria for kill and threat are specified in the customer contract, along with a number of assumptions to make when calculating this number. Fortunately, a tool has been created to allow a user to set up their product and kill criteria, and the software draws a grid of shotlines across a spectrum of directions to calculate the weighted total probability of kill. This tool, called COVART, is visually intuitive, and provides real-time results to the user when ran. A screenshot is shown below.
Setting up the model in the space and inputting the right assumptions and protocols is traditionally the most time-consuming process. Our team divided the aircraft into major subsystems, and each team member was tasked with owning a number of subsystems and having the model setup with the complete subsystem. I was tasked with two major subsystems (in total, over 500 components), but with my hard work and dedication, was able to complete them both and assist other team members to complete their subsystem.
One aspect of setting up the model are to individually bring each part of the aircraft from its native CAD space, simplified, and uploaded into COVART via a specific file format. Another major aspect is coding a fault tree to input into COVART to allow the model to accurately track the redundant systems in the aircraft. Through this model development, I introduced two methods to allow for the model to be made quickly yet effectively. Those where:
Using a third party CAD manipulation tool to quickly simplify each piece part and upload into the correct file format in COVART. This tool was much easier to use than the native CAD space for manipulation, and it saved over $100k in labor costs to the program.
Using and documenting how to set up a fault tree in a specialized fault tree development tool that inputs an intuitive block diagram, and outputs the fault tree in a format acceptable to COVART.
Conclusion
We had a goal, as a team, to have the COVART file size be less than 1 GB. This was to allow COVART to run very quickly through simulations. The goal was lofty, since the original model size (before I joined the team) was 15 GB. Through the efforts of using a third party tool, as well as the support given to representative fault tree, we met our deadline with high customer praise.