Failure Impact and Uncertainty Impact Metrics for Hybrid-Electric Turboprop Development

This paper introduces two novel metrics—failure impact (FI) and uncertainty impact (UI)—to overcome the limitations of traditional technology and integration readiness levels in evaluating hybrid-electric turboprop aircraft. Scored on a 1–9 scale, FI and UI quantify component failure severity and the impact of input uncertainties on system-level metrics like block fuel and maximum takeoff weight. The UI scores are rigorously derived using a physics-based sizing model and variance-based global sensitivity analysis (Sobol indices). Applying these metrics to a 50-passenger aircraft’s critical components (battery, motor, inverter, and thermal management system [TMS]), the study utilizes multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) frameworks across four strategic scenarios. Methods, including multi-attribute utility theory, analytic hierarchy process, best–worst method (BWM), and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution, consistently prioritize the battery for testing and resource allocation due to its high FI and UI risks, followed by the TMS. In contrast, the noncompensatory Elimination and Choice Expressing Reality III (ELECTRE III) method ranked the battery last due to extreme risk vetoes. The study concludes that the BWM is the most effective and consistent MADM approach for aerospace applications due to its simplicity.