Integrated vehicle health management (IVHM) is a collection of data relevant to the present and future performance of a vehicle system and its transformation into information can be used to support operational decisions. This design and operation concept embraces an integration of sensors, communication technologies, and artificial intelligence to provide vehicle-wide abilities to diagnose problems and recommend solutions. This article aims to report the state-of-the-art of IVHM research by presenting a systematic review of the literature. The literature from different sources is collated and analysed, and the major emerging themes are presented. On this basis, the article describes the IVHM concept and its evolution, discusses configurations and existing applications along with main drivers, potential benefits and barriers to adoption, summarizes design guidelines and available methods, and identifies future research challenges.

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State-of-the-art in integrated vehicle health management

This paper introduces a systematic design methodology, namely the functional fault analysis (FFA), developed with the goal of integrating SHM into early design of aerospace systems. The basis for the FFA methodology is a high-level, functional model of a system that captures the physical architecture, including the physical connectivity of energy, material, and data flows within the system. The model also contains all sensory information, failure modes associated with each component of the system, the propagation of the effects of these failure modes, and the characteristic timing by which fault effects propagate along the modeled physical paths. Using this integrated model, the designers and system analysts can assess the sensor suitepsilas diagnostic functionality and analyze the ldquoracerdquo between the propagation of fault effects and the fault detection isolation and response (FDIR) mechanisms designed to compensate and respond to them. The Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle has been introduced as a case example to illustrate the use of the Functional Fault Analysis (FFA) methodology during system design.

Integrating system health management into the early design of aerospace systems using Functional Fault Analysis

Prognostic and Health Management (PHM), which could provide the ability of fault detection (FD), fault isolation (FI) and estimation of remaining useful life (RUL), has been applied to detect and diagnose device faults and assess its health status, with aiming to enhance device reliability, safety, and reduce its maintenance costs. In this paper, taking an aircraft fuel System as an example, with virtual instrument technology and computer simulation technology, an integrated approach of signal processing method and model-based method is introduced to build the virtual simulation software of aircraft fuel PHM system for overcoming the difficulty in obtaining the failures information from the real fuel system. During the process of constructing the aircraft fuel PHM system, the first step is to analyze the fuel system failure modes and status parameters that can identify the failure modes. The main failure modes are determined as joints looseness, pipe broken, nozzle clogging, and fuel tank leakage. The status parameters are fuel pressure and fuel flow. Then, the status parameter model is constructed to imitate the behavior of sensor which detecting fuel system status. On this basis, utilizing the signal processing module provided by Labview software, the outputs from the virtual sensors, which collect the failure data, are processed to realize the simulation of failure detection and failure diagnosis. All the result shows that the virtual simulation software well accomplishes the task of the aircraft fuel system failure detection and diagnosis.

Application of Prognostic and Health Management technology on aircraft fuel system

Integrated System Health Management (ISHM) describes a set of system capabilities that in aggregate perform: determination of condition for each system element, detection of anomalies, diagnosis of causes for anomalies, and prognostics for future anomalies and system behavior. The ISHM should also provide operators with situational awareness of the system by integrating contextual and timely data, information, and knowledge (DIaK) as needed. ISHM capabilities can be implemented using a variety of technologies and tools. This chapter provides an overview of ISHM contributing technologies and describes in further detail a novel implementation architecture along with associated taxonomy, ontology, and standards. The operational ISHM testbed is based on a subsystem of a rocket engine test stand. Such test stands contain many elements that are common to manufacturing systems, and thereby serve to illustrate the potential benefits and methodologies of the ISHM approach for intelligent manufacturing.

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Rocket Testing and Integrated System Health Management

Current manned spaceflight programs, including the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle, have a strong dependency on real-time support of ground personnel for the safe and successful execution of space missions. This system design and operations paradigm has proven to be largely successful over the last 40 years of manned spaceflight. However, NASA has set a new course towards exploring space beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and short duration missions. The new Exploration Program vision includes extended surface operations on the Moon and Mars, which bring a new set of system design and operation challenges and requirements. The new challenges range from developing systems that enable a sustainable program over many years, to the technical challenges of long duration missions beyond LEO, like asynchronous communications with Earth-based support centers. Thus, the next generation spacecraft must have the capability to support critical, real-time decision-making on-board, enabling mission operations management that is not highly dependant on timely Earth-based support. Moreover, reliable and accurate system health state information is required for autonomous and/or interactive real-time decision-making and management of mission operations. The development of an optimal level of health management and automation capabilities on future spacecraft systems must start early in the design of such systems, and be directly influenced by system and mission requirements. Honeywell and other industry members have made significant technological advances in the area of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM). IVHM has provided significant life cycle savings in commercial and military aviation through improved reliability and lower operational costs. These benefits can also be applied to spacecraft, while building the foundation for automating other mission management functions. However, the use of an operations-relevant environment, such as the Mission Control Center environment, and the early involvement of the operations community in the development and evaluation of such technology is critical to the success of the development effort. It ensures that the developed capabilities have a direct benefit on crew safety, mission affordability, effectiveness, and are extensible to the needs of the next generation space systems. This can be accomplished by using current space flight programs, like ISS, as a platform to

Health Management and Automation for Future Space Systems

A highly, functional Integrated Systems Health Management (ISHM) system holds great promise to significantly improve safety, reliability, affordability and sustainability for future space exploration systems. Military and commercial aircraft systems, such as Boeing’s 777 airliner and Northrop’s B-2 Bomber, have successfully implemented sophisticated ISHM systems and have already witnessed the benefits in safety, affordability and maintainability. While there has been much progress made in applying ISHM to aircraft including the Joint Strike Fighter, an advanced ISHM system has not yet been employed on current US launch or space systems. In addition, to meet the demands of a space environment including long communication delays, high response needs, lighter weight/lower power and affordability constraints, a higher level of autonomy and reconfigurability will be needed on future ISHM systems to enable future exploration systems to meet its goals. Under the Next Generation Launch Technology (NGLT) Program, a multi-center NASA team worked to develop an ISHM development plan and implementation approach for next generation reusable vehicles. Elements of this plan can be applied to the current NASA Exploration Program. Subsystem domain experts from various centers were assembled to help develop the NGLT ISHM plans and identify technology needs. The technology needs ranged from system engineering design and optimization processes to advanced sensors, data mining tools, advanced diagnostic and prognostic algorithms and intelligent software managers and planners. Various facilities and flight vehicles were also considered for use as virtual and hardware testbeds to demonstrate ISHM capabilities. In addition, an ISHM concept of operations plan was developed to describe how ISHM will function through all operational phases of future Exploration Systems. A summary of these plans will be presented in this paper and recommendations will be made for further development.

Philip F. Wysocki

Papers

Integrated Systems Health Management for Exploration Systems