Integrated equipment health management system design and development

Complex arguments need to be made regarding the benefit case for the sensor and algorithms available for health monitoring systems. A methodology to support these discussions is introduced based on functional failure information for the system. For the failures captured, incipient faults and their identifying effects are recorded. A corresponding algorithm and sensor input cost can be compared to the operational effects of not providing early warning of a failure. An intuitive visual heuristic, based upon an isolation distance metric and dimensional reduction technique, is introduced. The metric guides system architecture and evaluates the effectiveness of system inputs. A testing procedure, which is directly linked to unit and operational costs, demonstrates the heuristic's validity against an on-wing expert system. The techniques are used to create a cost trade-off space, to compare health monitoring architectures.