Avionics reliability analysis

The U.S. Air Force is developing an Integrated Communications, Navigation, and Identification Avionics (aviation electronics) system with the acronym ICNIA for use in tactical aircraft. Designers of ICNIA as well as the Air Force need to be informed of the reliability of proposed designs. Hence, the Air Force contracted The Analytic Sciences Corporation (TASC) to develop a model of the ICNIA system and to develop algorithms for determining various system performance measures such as the systems reliability. TASC developed the ICNIA model and developed a software package called MIREM to analyze ICNIA systems. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of ICNIA, the developers of MIREM were forced to incorporate several approximations in MIREM. In the report by Foley, we showed that these approximations can perform poorly in some artificially constructed examples. Their accuracy on realistic examples is unknown. We have developed and implemented two algorithms for analyzing ICNIA. The algorithms do not use any approximations and are computationally feasible on realistic sized examples. It is recommended that MIREM be modified to use the algorithms described in this paper.