FUMS™ technologies for verifiable affordable prognostics health management (PHM)

PHM is a logical step following from the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) continual efforts to improve aircraft management, affordability, availability, airworthiness and performance (MAAAP). MOD has fitted aircraft with data collection equipment such as flight data recorders (FDR), engine usage monitoring systems (EUMS) and health and usage monitoring systems (HUMS). Whilst the MOD ground-based systems contain a wealth of information including huge volumes of flight data, there is a growing interest in analysing and automatically trending/fusing/mining this information, combining it with MOD and design authority (DA) experiences and verifying emerging PHM algorithms before seriously considering them within the management/maintenance infrastructure. Smiths has worked closely with MOD and evolved a flight and usage management software (FUMS™) to address this need. FUMS™ tools have operated on existing aircraft data to provide an affordable framework for developing and verifying diagnostic, prognostic and life management approaches. In the context of MOD objectives, FUMS™ provides a ground-based fleet management framework operating on existing MOD databases and aircraft data. It also provides a procurement risk control framework to assist with verifying emerging PHM approaches using real data and to collect verification evidence for qualification and maintenance credit purposes. The paper describes the main features of FUMS™ and addresses some of the verification issues of PHM algorithms including those of FUMS™.