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Collaboratively written by eleven experts with extensive experience in the field of commercial aviation, The World of Civil Aerospace is a unique book that defines its own category. Covering the beginnings of commercial aviation, aircraft design and certification, manufacturing and testing, airline operation, maintenance and safety, among other topics, The World of Civil Aerospace shows the reader the fundamental (yet almost invisible) aspects of how the planes and airports we use every day actually function. The title, edited by Prof. Ian Jennions, from Cranfield University in the UK, came about from the desire to share the inner workings of what it takes to create, test, approve, certify and launch a new aircraft. Not mention how to maintain it and make the user experience of flying it positive. With the commercial aviation industry expected to continue to grow for decades to come, the challenges of keeping aircraft in the air safely, reliably and economically are enormous.

In the past few decades the number of airplanes has increased dramatically and aircraft systems have become increasingly more complex. Under these conditions, the next generation of airplanes will undergo substantial changes and will make significant technical progress to improve operational safety. This vision is entirely consistent with the adoption of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) technology which uses merging of interdisciplinary trends to carry out safe and effective vehicle operation. Hitherto, IVHM has made much progress in the realm of maintenance and operation, but little on safety assessment. This paper discusses the issues around how IVHM could be used to aid the operational safety assessment in the aviation industry. Special attention is paid to existing safety assessment methods, and some challenges and promising research directions are highlighted.

Today, we are all strongly dependent on the correct functioning of technical systems. They fail, and we become vulnerable. Disruptions due to degradation or anomalous behavior can negatively impact safety, operations, and brand name, reducing the profitability of all elements of the value chain. This can be tolerated if the link between cause and effect is understood and remedied. Anomalous behavior, which indicates systems or subsystems not acting in accordance with design intent, is a much more serious problem. It includes unwanted system responses and faults whose root cause can’t be properly diagnosed, leading to costly, and sometimes unnecessary, component replacements. The title No Fault Found: The Search for the Root Cause was developed to propose solutions to this technical and business challenge, which has become less and less acceptable to the commercial aviation industry globally.

For Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) technology to fully achieve its promise, there is a need for integration architecture to support interoperability between multiple vendors' IVHM components and insertion of new IVHM capabilities. To date there have been very limited studies on different approaches in integrating IVHM components. This paper presents design candidates for plug-and-play (PnP) IVHM architecture. The open standard based designs are derived from desired IVHM data flow characteristics and system configuration requirements. The designs and enabling middleware technologies are qualitatively and empirically evaluated for their adequacy and effectiveness. The qualitative assessment focuses on the implementation and system configuration based on different test scenarios. The empirical performance is measured in terms of latency (in both normal and intermittent network connections) and throughput.

Integrated Vehicle Health Management: Implementation and Lessons Learned is the fourth title in the IVHM series published by SAE International. This new book introduces a variety of case studies, lessons learned, and insights on what it really means to develop, implement, or manage an integrated system of systems. Integrated Vehicle Health Management: Implementation and Lessons Learned brings to the reader a wide set of hands-on stories, made possible by the contribution of twenty-three authors, who agreed to share their experience and wisdom on how new technologies are developed and put to work. This effort was again coordinated by Dr. Ian K. Jennions, Director of the IVHM Centre at Cranfield University (UK), and editor of the previous books in the series.

Although the concept of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) can be complex in its implementation, it is essentially based upon a simple idea: the more you know about a particular machine’s ability to function, the quicker you can act to prevent malfunctioning. This rapidly developing area of engineering seeks to enable better management of both the vehicle and vehicle fleet health. Use of IVHM can improve vehicle reliability, safety, and reduce unnecessary, unscheduled maintenance through the use of diagnostic and prognosis systems that monitor data and overall vehicle health. From an initial idea by the SAE IVHM Steering Group, these books have been collaboratively written by experts from academia, research and industry, and represent the collective voice of the most qualified authorities in the field.

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) is a relatively new subject, with its roots back in the space sector of the early 1990s. Although many of the papers written around that time did not refer to it as IVHM, the fundamental principles of considering an integrated end-to-end system to monitor the overall health of the asset were clearly visible. As the subject of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) and its associated technologies have grown up, businesses are making the transformation from selling a product to selling a service. This can be viewed as a positive disruption, as a relatively small technology breakthrough is being brought to market for a large business benefit. The sequence “sense—acquire—transfer—analyze—act “ feeds the information (processed data) on the asset’s health into the Operations or Management control center.

In today's aircraft the diagnostic and prognostic systems play a crucial part in aircraft safety while reducing the operating and maintenance costs. Aircraft are very complex in their design and require consistent monitoring of systems to establish the overall vehicle health status. Most diagnostic systems utilize advanced algorithms (e.g. Bayesian belief networks or neural networks) which usually operate at system or sub-system level. The sub-system reasoners collect the input from components and sensors to process the data and provide the diagnostic/detection results to the flight advisory unit. Several sources of information must be taken into account when assessing the vehicle health, to accurately identify the health state in real time. These sources of information are independent system-level diagnostics that do not exchange any information/data with the surrounding systems.

UAS (Unmanned aircraft system), widely known to the general public as drones, are comprised of two major system elements: an Unmanned Aircraft (UA) and a Ground Control Station (GCS). UAS have a high mishap rate when compared to manned aircraft. This high mishap rate is one of several barriers to the acceptance of UAS for more widespread usage. Better awareness of the UA real time as well as long term health situation may allow timely condition based maintenance. Vehicle health and usage are two parts of the same solution to improve vehicle safety and lifecycle costs. These can be worked on through the use of two related aircraft management methods, these are: IVHM (Integrated Vehicle Health Management) which combines diagnosis and prognosis methods to help manage aircraft health and maintenance, and FOQA (Flight Operations Quality Assurance) systems which are mainly used to assist in pilot skill quality assurance.

The third volume in the Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) series focuses on the technology that actually supports the implementation of IVHM in real-life situations. Edited by Ian K. Jennions, Director of the IVHM Center at Cranfield University, UK, this book was written collaboratively by twenty-seven authors from industry, academia and governmental research agencies.

Following the best seller, Integrated Vehicle Health Management: Perspectives on an Emerging Field, the new title Integrated Vehicle Health Management: The Business Case Theory and Practice takes the subject to the next level. This time it addresses the commercial justification for the adoption of a new modus operandi in asset health management, and its impact on business strategy and servitization of technology. Edited by Dr. Ian Jennions, Director of the IVHM Center at Cranfield University in the U.K., the book tackles the most important questions on the transformation of business from selling a product, and deriving future income from spare part sales, to selling a service in which income is received in return for effective maintenance of the asset. The resulting service business requires a much deeper understanding of how the product is used and should be maintained, thus providing the rationale for Integrated Vehicle Health Management- IVHM.

Unique and groundbreaking—this highly-anticipated book addresses both basic and advanced concepts critical for the understanding and support of the developing field of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM). From an initial idea by the SAE IVHM Steering Group, collaboratively written by experts from academia, research and industry, the thirteen chapters within this book represent the collective voice of the most qualified authorities in the field. Highlights of the book include: -a single definition and taxonomy of IVHM, as well as basic principles -the identification of how and where IVHM should be implemented -the commercial value of IVHM -vehicle health management systems engineering -algorithms and their impact on IVHM -IVHM future directions and issues -Case study on IHUMS This book serves as the perfect introduction to IVHM for engineers, executives, academic instructors, and students.