Integrated Vehicle Health Management - System of Systems Integration

Description / Abstract: Owners and operators of complex engineered systems assume economic and safety imperatives associated with the ever-increasing complexity of systems. This is particularly true in the domain of transportation systems, such as automotive and aerospace, and places strong demands on the designers and maintainers of those systems to minimize critical performance issues and downtime. Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) is a multifaceted discipline that has emerged to meet the technical challenges in effecting those goals, which requires the ability to:

Accurately predict the time to failure or remaining useful life of critical components or subsystems and

Effectively isolate the root cause of failures once their effects have been observed and

Provide system stakeholders actionable information in support of operations, maintenance andsupport

IVHM, then, can be thought of as the unified capability of a system of systems to assess the current or future state of the member system health, and integrate that picture of system health within a framework of available resources and operational demand. This requires effective capabilities to assess applicable fault detection, diagnostic, prognostic and reasoning technologies. The goal of the assessment is to optimize the system’s ability to detect and isolate subsystem failures, predict the remaining useful life of the faulty component, and assess decision support and reasoning capabilities. A fully integrated approach will then mapsubsystem boundaries and system levels of indenture to preventive or mitigating maintenance approaches to restoring system function—at minimal cost and safety impact.