General reasoning system for health management

There is a growing interest in developing affordable airborne diagnostics, prognostics, and decision support systems that facilitate comprehensive ground based maintenance management systems that can track individual aircraft in use and optimize fleet-wide decision making. This paper presents a methodology to develop a general reasoning system. When assessing the health of the vehicle, several sources of information must be taken into account to be able to accurately identify health state in real-time. The objective of the system is to reason across the subsystem hierarchy and to present an accurate prognostic for maintenance and planning purposes. This paper uses a generic fuel system as an example target for the methodology. The example system is extensible to an entire vehicle. The emphasis of the paper is on the efficient aggregation of data and its use to maximize health state knowledge. This paper concludes with a summary of benefits of the methodology, primarily a more accurate assessment of systems health.