Airplane Reliability Study Using Graph Theory Based Matlab GUI Application

Abstract

This paper presents an airplane reliability study using a developed Matlab GUI application that is based on graph theory. This study deals with the determination of the reliability of an aircraft by considering its all subsystems such as airframe, cockpit instrumentation, control system, electrical circuit and power plant system. The developed application can handle any failure distribution functions. It uses the inclusion-exclusion method for finding the minimal paths for directed acyclic graph using reliability block diagram. A system may be considered to operate if there exists a set of operating components from the source to the target. So, at least minimal paths must function for the system operation. The probability of the union of all minimal paths may be employed to determine the reliability of the whole system.