Integrating health management into legacy platforms

Owners and operators of air and space vehicles frequently desire to retrofit health management technology onto their platforms. Prognostics and condition based maintenance processes offer the promise of higher availability, reduced operating costs, and improved maintenance efficiency. An effective health management system, judiciously applied, can positively impact these goals, but to be effective it can require significant integration effort at the component, subsystem, system, vehicle, and fleet levels. Once in operation, aerospace vehicles present unique challenges for integration of modern health management technology. This paper identifies the motivations, challenges, and technologies to successfully integrate health management into existing platforms. The primary factors that influence the success of health management system integration are identified. Clearly, common and ubiquitous standards would enable significant reductions in this integration cost and make IVHM (Integrated Vehicle Health Management) technology practical in more applications. Specific integration approaches involving high bandwidth sensors, wireless communications, and partitioning of onboard processing were prototyped and are described as well as the impact of open standards to reduce integration costs and enable greater access to technology from industry, academia and government organizations.