Many types of system operate for missions which are made up of several phases. For the
complete mission to be a success, the system must operate successfully during each of the phases.
Examples of such systems include an aircraft flight, and also many military operations for both aircraft
and ships. An aircraft mission could be considered as the following phases: taxiing to the runway, takeoff,
climbing to the correct altitude, cruising, descending, landing and taxiing back to the terminal.
Component failures can occur at any point during the mission but their condition may only be critical
for one particular phase. As such it may be that the transition from one phase to another is the critical
event leading to mission failure, the component failures resulting in the system failure may have
occurred during some previous phase.
This paper describes a means of analysing the reliability of non-repairable systems which undergo
phased missions. Fault Tree Analysis has been used as the method to assess the system performance.
The results of the analysis are the system failure modes in each phase (minimal cut sets), the failure
probability in each phase and the total mission unreliability. To increase the efficiency of the analysis
the fault trees constructed to represent the system failure logic are analysed using a modularisation
method. Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD’s) are then employed to quantify the likelihood of failure in
each phase