Overview
The increase of aerospace systems' complexity has meant that by using existing methods for systems development, industry has reached a barrier to innovation and a risk to the competitiveness of products. This is characterised by an increasing time to market for new technologies, increasing costs to demonstrate proof of safety, a greater demand for skilled resources and a limitation on design iterations, which means there is less time to optimise designs that are compliant with safety targets. MISSA aimed at filling this gap and providing methods and infrastructure that accelerate the convergence toward optimal system architecture that integrate safety constrains.
To reach this goal, MISSA focused on four main enabling contributions that are naturally linked together in the design process:
- In the very preliminary design phases, when aircraft functions have been allocated to systems, MISSA first provided methods and tools that support design and installation optimisation;
- Secondly, MISSA supported the accurate definition and assessment of a systems organic architecture against the safety requirements resulting from the early design phases;
- Thirdly, MISSA provided means for dealing with detailed system architecture and design;
- Finally, MISSA developed a software infrastructure that facilitates the exchange of information needed to achieve the above three points.
Thus MISSA developed methods and tools to help safety engineers to collect, navigate, and manage information, structure their arguments, express their ideas, and most importantly find solutions to problems in an efficient, auditable and exhaustive way.
In MISSA (More Integrated Systems Safety Assessment) we aimed to develop methods and tools to help safety engineers to collect, navigate, and manage information, structure their arguments, express their ideas, and most importantly find solutions to problems in an efficient, auditable and exhaustive way.
The MISSA project Start date was the 1st of April 2008 and it was a 36-month project ending on the last day of March 2011.
The Project work is organised in Work Packages (WP's), as follows:
- WP1: Project Management and Quality Management;
- WP2: Requirements Capture;
- WP3: Support Aircraft Level Modelling and Analysis;
- WP4: Support Systems Level Modelling and Analysis;
- WP5: Support Systems Detailed Implementation;
- WP6: Synthesis, Argumentation and Change;
- WP7: Case Study Preparation and Evaluation;
- WP8: Dissemination and Exploitation.
Funding
Results
The MISSA Project has developed methods and tools to support safety modelling and analysis at the Aircraft Level, Systems Architecture Level and Systems Implementation Level. Transversally across all levels methods and tools were delivered for performing safety argumentation and for the collection, referencing, and configuration management of representative design artefacts generated by these new model based safety methods and tools to substantiate a safety argument.
- Aircraft Level
At the Aircraft level, seven methods and tools were developed to support the safety activities related to two themes, functional requirements apportionment and architecture optimization as well as to help with space allocation and particular risk analysis. - Systems architectural level
At the systems architectural level, work was performed in three general areas leading to twelve new developments, the first relates to creating a safety assessment model, the second relates to improvements in the analysis engines and the third relates to performing and managing incremental assessments. - Systems implementation level;
At the systems implementation level work was performed on two themes, Methodology and tools for qualitative assessment and on Methodology and Tools for Model Correlation.
Strategy targets
Innovating for the future (technology and behaviour): A European Transport Research and Innovation Policy
Readiness
Further research is necessary. The MISSA project has produced a range of capabilities that will have different levels of maturity. Some of the capabilities are quite mature that are either in a position to influence the use of the currently applied tools and so are immediately industrialise-able, others need some additional consideration by the industry as a whole but are, nevertheless, close to industrialisation. MISSA has also produced some capabilities that are much less mature and as such will require further research before they are ready to be applied industrially.