Vehicle-Level Reasoning Systems: Integrating System-Wide data to Estimate Instantaneous Health State

One of the primary goals of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) is to detect, diagnose, predict, and mitigate adverse events during the flight of an aircraft, regardless of the subsystem(s) from which the adverse event arises. To properly address this problem, it is critical to develop technologies that can integrate large, heterogeneous (meaning that they contain both continuous and discrete signals), asynchronous data streams from multiple subsystems in order to detect a potential adverse event, diagnose its cause, predict the effect of that event on the remaining useful life of the vehicle, and then take appropriate steps to mitigate the event if warranted. These data streams may have highly non-Gaussian distributions and can also contain discrete signals such as caution and warning messages which exhibit non-stationary and obey arbitrary noise models. At the aircraft level, a Vehicle-Level Reasoning System (VLRS) can be developed to provide aircraft with at least two significant capabilities: improvement of aircraft safety due to enhanced monitoring and reasoning about the aircraft’s health state, and also potential cost savings through Condition Based Maintenance (CBM). Along with the achieving the benefits of CBM, an important challenge facing aviation safety today is safeguarding against system- and component-level failures and malfunctions.

Citation: A. N. Srivastava, D. Mylaraswamy, R. Mah, and E. Cooper, “Vehicle Level Reasoning Systems: Concept and Future Directions,” Society of Automotive Engineers Integrated Vehicle Health Management Book, Ian Jennions, Ed., 2011.