A Supernetwork Model for ATM System Reliability Analysis

As the transport volume of civil aviation increases rapidly, more attention than before has been paid to the stable and reliable operation of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system. Then, the reliability analysis of the system is in urgent need. Meantime, due to the complexity of this “system of systems” which contains a diversity of individual systems, the construction of the model which can efficiently and accurately reflect the characteristics of ATM system is crucial. After the characteristic analysis of the system, a modeling method based on the supernetwork theory is introduced in this paper. The theory specializes in characterizing the complicated structural attribute of the complex system and the interaction relationship between the system components. Furthermore, the method is applied to the modeling of the System Wide Information Management (SWIM)-based ATM system which facilitates the information access and interchange of distributed heterogeneous systems. Specifically, the supernetwork model can be divided into three subnetworks according to the user based information domains of SWIM. Considered that there remains a certain number of invalid paths between nodes within the supernetwork, five types of supply-demand flows are proposed, and based on which improvements in traditional reliability index, typically the efficiency parameters are achieved. In order to simulate the performance of the SWIM-based ATM system in the case of system failure, the reliability index of the supernetwork model is calculated under the node removal strategy. Analysis results indicate the reasonability and applicability of the reliability analysis scheme for ATM system.