New industrial testing and maintenance for AESA radars

The Active Antennas (AESA) technology has dramatically increased the operational capability of modern radars. It is also important to reduce as much as possible the cost of production. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of achievements in the production of AESA radars. The first part deals with improvements for reducing the costs and the complexity of industrial testing. In the second part, a new method aiming a better efficiency of test data exploitation is presented. A new method of using data from integrated testing (Built-In-Test) is presented. It is a method of Data Mining based on Bayesian networks that processes all the raw data issued from the Built-In-Test (B.I.T.). It allows detecting and diagnosing accurately defects that are difficult to catch with current methods, such as fugitive failures or initiation of youth's defects. Originally planned for testing in production, this method could replace, in the future, the current B.I.T. which is used in operational use. By improving the preventive detection of faults, the operational availability of the equipment is increased and the ownership cost is reduced.