Redundancy system design for an aircraft door management system

• Published in: Computers & operations research 2018-06, Vol.94, p.11-22
• Main Authors: Schäfer, Lukas, García, Sergio, Mitschke, Andreas, Srithammavanh, Vassili
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Air transportation industry; Aircraft; Aircraft accidents & safety; Aircraft architecture; Aircraft compartments; Aircraft design; Branch & bound algorithms; Branch-and-bound; Collision avoidance systems; Integer programming; Mixed integer linear programming; Operations research; Power consumption; Redundancy; Safety critical; Solvers; Systems design
• ISSN: 0305-0548; 1873-765X; 0305-0548
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cor.2018.02.005

•A new MILP model for a redundant system design in an aircraft is proposed.•Specialized branching rules and heuristic are introduced.•Computational tests shown for different instances.•It is shown that the new algorithms reduce the solving time significantly. The door management system (DMS) is a safety-critical system in an aircraft which checks if all doors are properly closed and the cabin has the correct pressure. As for every safety-critical system in an aircraft, it has to meet some safety regulations and it should be designed optimally in terms of weight, cost or power consumption. This paper studies the problem of designing a DMS optimally as per the previous objectives while guaranteeing that the system is k-redundant. We call this new problem the DMS design problem with redundancy. First, we propose a new MILP model for the DMS problem which includes redundancy. Because the model is too difficult to be solved efficiently by standard MILP solvers, we introduce specialized branching rules and a new heuristic. Computational tests are run for example instances of the DMS problem by implementing these new rule in CPLEX. It is shown that the solving time is significantly reduced through the new branching rules and heuristic.