A Model of Aircraft Health Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis Based on Beacon Exception Analysis

Beacon Exception Analysis for Maintenance (BEAM) has the potential to be an efficient and effective model in monitoring and diagnosis of nominal and anomalous activity in both spacecraft and aircraft systems. The main goals of the BEAM are to classify events from abstract metrics, reduce the telemetry requirements during normal and abnormal flight operations, and to detect changes and diagnose faults. The paper explores the mathematical foundations behind the BEAM process and analyzes its performance on an experimental dataset. Furthermore, a model of aircraft health monitoring and fault diagnosis based on BEAM is built and analyzed. It is an abstract measurement tool to track the entire system, which reduces the telemetry set to simplify tracking of the system. What's more, it maximizes fault diagnosis while minimizing the false alarm rate and simplifies diagnostics of system-wide faults. The BEAM model of health monitoring and fault diagnosis is tested by the real aircraft engine data. In the test experiments, all faults are coded. The results of experiments show that the BEAM model has the advantages of high accuracy and low fault error alarm, which means the model is able to monitor health and diagnosis fault of aircraft. More importantly, BEAM can be implemented as a real-time process in a more efficient manner.