Integrating development- and support tools for PHM in Saab 39 Gripen

As the requirements of a modern air vehicle changes during development and use, requirements and design of test and recording functions will always have to be up to date. To achieve control over recording, fault isolation and health management in a tightly integrated avionics system with several configuration variants and frequent updates, powerful tools are needed, especially given demands for cost reduction and the limited staff available. Traditionally development has been divided among several departments, with own processes and tools, leading to redundant work and inconsistency, despite tremendous inspection efforts. This paper describes how the workflows to define pilot warnings, recording needs and fault isolation are integrated in order to reduce development time and reuse data. There are over 500 failure modes and about 100 maintenance fault reports defined for the Gripen Aircraft. The impact of a failure is dependent on equipment configuration and thus the required pilot actions or corrective maintenance actions will differ between the variants. In complex failure situations it is important to find the primary fault and filter faults that can be considered as consequences of the primary fault. Experience has shown that the recommended corrective actions often need to be revised as operational experience is accumulated. As changes in a delivered product are costly, the method of separately loadable databases for flight manuals and fault isolation information will significantly reduce the cost of an update and also enable an incremental development. This paper will also describe how field loadable databases can be used in aircraft and ground support systems