Advanced Intelligent Web-Based Options to Acquire and Analyze Aircraft Health and Test Data

Automated assessment and forecasting of aircraft health status has become a prime requirement for safety, reliability, and cost streamlining for 21st century’s aviation sector. Presently, a variety of flight data, functionality, performance, and maintenance information are being collected and some are stored in databases, but an integrated health management (HM) system that utilizes all these information is virtually nonexistent. Qualtech Systems, Inc. in collaboration with Aptima, Inc. proposes developing an integrated multi-source data acquisition and analytic solution for facilitating diagnostics and prognostics, and providing decision support for operations, maintenance, logistics, supply chain, and military flight quality assurance related processes. Intelligent agent-based techniques will be used for gathering data from heterogeneous sources. Multi-disciplinary analytic techniques including signal processing, time-series-analysis, multivariate statistics, and probabilistic decision fusion, coupled with dependency model-based techniques are envisaged for the HM solution. An optimal decision-oriented user interface will satisfy information dissemination and visualization requirements. Preliminary theoretical development will involve a limited number of simulated data sources from a target naval aircraft. Software implementation and deployment of the solution on the target platform will be performed in subsequent phases of the work. The resultant integrated and flexible HM solution will have applicability across various military and commercial platforms.