MBSE Safety and Reliability practices are of paramount importance for Anzen. CORSARIO marks the first real-life implementation where these practices have been applied throughout the system development lifecycle. On June 12, 2025, the CORSARIO project reached a pivotal milestone through successful concept validation at Airbus Helicopters’ facilities in Albacete, Spain. This achievement underscores the project’s readiness to progress from development to commercialization, reflecting extensive collaborative efforts and technological advancements.
What Is the CORSARIO Project?
The CORSARIO project represents a cutting-edge collaboration among industry leaders INSTER, Airbus Helicopters, Tecnobit, and Anzen. The project’s primary goal is to integrate advanced satellite communication systems seamlessly into next-generation helicopter platforms, enhancing capabilities, safety, and efficiency.
Key Project Objectives
- Electronically Steerable Antenna (ESA): Offers a compact form factor, significantly improving helicopter aerodynamics, maneuverability, and fuel efficiency compared to traditional mechanical antennas.
- Advanced Digital Signal Processing: Effectively mitigates interference from rotor blades, allowing flexible antenna placement and optimized integration across diverse helicopter models.
- Additive Manufacturing Techniques: Greatly reduces structural weight, directly contributing to enhanced fuel economy and extended mission duration.
Anzen’s Critical Role: MBSE Safety and Reliability Analyses
Anzen, a key strategic partner within the CORSARIO consortium, leverages advanced Model-Based Safety Engineering (MBSE) techniques. Employing industry-leading tools such as Capella and the proprietary ATICA plugin, Anzen ensures that system safety processes are transparent, traceable, and meticulously documented.
MBSE Safety and Reliability Advantages:
- Streamlined traceability in safety and reliability analyses.
- Automatic generation of comprehensive and precise documentation.
- An integrated view of the system architecture, safety, and reliability concerns.
Reliability Analysis: Foundation of Safety
Reliability Prediction Reports (RPR) constitute a foundational element in aerospace system validation. Anzen meticulously applied the MIL-HDBK-217F standard to quantify reliability accurately for each subsystem and component of the satellite communication system.
Why Reliability Analysis is Crucial:
- Offers precise quantitative reliability metrics
- Provides critical input data for advanced safety analyses, fostering proactive risk mitigation
To enhance efficiency, Anzen developed a proprietary reliability analysis tool, streamlining component classification aligned with MIL-HDBK-217F.
(Stay tuned for further details about this new tool.)
MBSE Functional FMEA: Comprehensive Risk Management
Anzen’s Functional Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) systematically utilizes reliability data, thoroughly evaluating potential failure scenarios within system functional blocks.
Structured Steps in FMEA:
- Detailed identification of potential functional failure modes for each functional block.
- Comprehensive analysis of associated causes and impacts on the system.
- Probabilistic failure rate assignment based on robust, conservative reliability data from RPR.
This analytical process is entirely traceable and seamlessly integrated within the Capella environment, enhanced by Anzen’s ATICA plugin, ensuring accuracy and coherence across safety documentation, and exemplifying rigorous MBSE safety and reliability practices.
MBSE System Safety Assessment (SSA): Assurance Through Integration
The SSA consolidates critical findings from both RPR and FMEA, rigorously verifying compliance with aerospace safety standards and regulations.
Essential SSA Components:
- Systematic identification and categorization of failure conditions via Functional Hazard Analysis (FHA)
- Formulation of rigorous quantitative safety requirements
- Execution of Fault Tree Analyses (FTA) linking specific failure modes directly to safety-critical conditions
The process conclusively verified that the CORSARIO system meets aerospace safety criteria, with full documentation and model integration via Capella and ATICA.
🤖 Pioneering AI in Aerospace Safety
The CORSARIO initiative was groundbreaking in its integration and validation of artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies within aerospace safety engineering, marking a new frontier for aerospace technology.
AI Innovations Explored:
- Automated Hazard Identification: AI algorithms systematically detect and categorize potential system hazards. More on this here!
- Enhanced Reliability Prediction: AI significantly improves accuracy and speed of reliability prediction reports.
Results from our pioneering efforts clearly demonstrated an increased efficiency, enabling faster decision-making.
Lessons Learned and Future Prospects
Participation in the CORSARIO project afforded Anzen profound insights into scaling the effective use of MBSE and AI-driven safety analyses.
Critical Lessons and Benefits:
- MBSE significantly streamlines complex design processes, improving clarity and efficiency.
- AI techniques dramatically improve process efficiency and development speed; however, engineers must carefully review AI-generated content and apply it under proper supervision.
These validated methodologies have demonstrated broad applicability, capable of significantly reducing development times, minimizing risks, and raising quality benchmarks across diverse aerospace platforms.
🚀 Conclusion: A Visionary Leap Forward
The successful validation of the CORSARIO project firmly establishes Anzen as a leader in MBSE Safety and Reliability for the aerospace sector. This project demonstrates how model-based methods combined with AI can redefine system safety and development speed. Through the strategic integration of MBSE, rigorous safety analyses, and pioneering AI solutions, Anzen effectively shapes the future of safer and more efficient systems.
Connect with Anzen to explore how your aerospace systems can benefit from cutting-edge MBSE Safety and Reliability practices.
📚 References and Further Reading
- El proyecto Corsario prueba con éxito la primera solución satelital de antenas con apuntamiento electrónico en helicópteros
- Grupo Oesía
- Revista Ejercitos
About the author
Daniel Villafañe is an aerospace engineer with expertise in avionics, systems engineering and model-based design and analysis.
At Anzen, Daniel’s work is focused on ATICA, our model-based tool for safety analysis. Daniel is in charge of building system models and applying systems engineering processes while using ATICA to improve results on safety and reliability analyses for aerospace avionics projects.
