Suresh Perinpanayagam and Eugene Butans

In aircraft industry, after labour and fuel costs, maintenance costs are the third largest expense item for both regional and national carriers. By implementing IVHM technologies not only the maintenance costs can be reduced, also it can provide more specific scheduled maintenance, on-board diagnostics and prognostics services. Maintenance department can be notified about the fault in advance and can arrange for components while aircraft is in mid-air. IVHM technologies minimize the physical diagnostics costs and provide more realistic condition based maintenance (CBM). The aim of this project is to investigate, using simulation and optimization, how IVHM network architecture can be built and implemented in aircraft (or IVHM applications), to support interoperability between multiple vendors’ IVHM components and insertion of new IVHM capabilities. IVHM consists of subsystems, sensors, model based reasoning systems for subsystem and system level managers, diagnostic and prognostics software for subsystems. In IVHM systems, usually there is large amount of data (collected from sensors), which needs to be delivered to right places at the right time so communication paradigm is the first and very essential design consideration which impacts many key properties such as scalability, reliability, availability, timeliness and configuration of overall system. The OSA-CBM (Open System Architecture for Condition Based Maintenance) defines an open architecture for moving information in a condition-based maintenance system. Typically, companies developing condition-based maintenance systems must develop software and hardware components, in addition a framework for these components to integrate. OSA-CBM is a standard architecture and framework for implementing condition-based maintenance systems. It not only describes the six functional blocks of condition based maintenance systems but also the interfaces to establish communication.