Aircraft flap and slat systems health monitoring using Statistical Process Control techniques

Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques have been successfully applied to a great variety of industrial processes. This paper presents the use of these techniques for the monitoring of the health state of aircraft flap and slat systems. Different approaches of univariate SPC and multivariate SPC (MSPC) are compared. The MSPC methods considered are Hotelling's T
²
and Runger U
²
. Results of the application of the methodology to simulated aircraft data are presented for illustration and validation of the proposed health monitoring techniques.