UAS Risk Analysis using Bayesian Belief Networks: An Application to the VirginiaTech ESPAARO

Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) are rapidly being adopted in the National Airspace (NAS) but experience a much higher failure rate than traditional aircraft. These SUAVs are quickly becoming complex enough to investigate alternative methods of failure analysis. This thesis proposes a method o...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kevorkian, Christopher George
Other Authors: Aerospace and Ocean Engineering
Format: Others
Published: Virginia Tech 2016
Subjects:
UAS
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10919/73047
Description
Summary:Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (SUAVs) are rapidly being adopted in the National Airspace (NAS) but experience a much higher failure rate than traditional aircraft. These SUAVs are quickly becoming complex enough to investigate alternative methods of failure analysis. This thesis proposes a method of expanding on the Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) method to a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) model. FTA is demonstrated to be a special case of BBN and BBN can allow for more complex interactions between nodes than is allowed by FTA. A model can be investigated to determine the components to which failure is most sensitive and allow for redundancies or mitigations against those failures. The introduced method is then applied to the Virginia Tech ESPAARO SUAV. === Master of Science