On Credibility Assessment in Aircraft System Simulation

Abstract: The aeronautical industry is becoming increasingly reliant on Modeling and Simulation (M&S) for use throughout all system development phases, for system verification, and end-user training. To justify and to utilize the full potential of today’s model-based approach, the development of efficient and industrially applicable methods for credibility assessment of M&S efforts is a key challenge.This work addresses methods facilitating credibility assessment of simulation models and simulator applications used in aircraft system development. For models of individual aircraft subsystems, an uncertainty aggregation method is proposed that facilitates early model validation through approximate uncertainty quantification. The central idea is to integrate information obtained during component level validation directly into the component equations, and to utilize this information in model level uncertainty quantification.In addition to methods intended for models of individual subsystems, this work also proposes a method and an associated tool for credibility assessment of large-scale simulator applications. As a complement to traditional document-centric approaches, static and dynamic credibility information is here presented to end-users directly during simulation. This implies a support for detecting test plan deficiencies, or that a simulator configuration is not a suitable platform for the execution of a particular test. The credibility assessment tool has been implemented and evaluated in two large-scale system simulators for the Saab Gripen fighter aircraft. The work presented herein also includes an industrially applicable workflow for development, validation, and export of simulation models.