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The cost-benefit analysis is one of the key decision aspects regarding the investment on IVHM systems especially for aerospace applications where the evaluation of the impacts of such systems on costs, safety and weight are critical for the vehicle operation during its lifecycle. This paper presents the application of linear programming to select and to quantify how many components an IVHM system should consider in order to maximize the total value that it delivers. This approach advantage is that it uses an exact algorithm, that guarantees the optimal solution given the inputs provided by the user. The formulation shows how the technical value of an IVHM solution can be evaluated taking into account key aspects for aerospace platforms such as weight, reliability and bus capacity restrictions through a linear integer programming model solved using the branch-and-bound method.

This paper presents a method to determine the root cause of an aircraft component failure by means of the aircraft fault messages history. The k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and the Tree-Augmented naive Bayes (TAN) methods were used in order to classify the failure causes as a function of the fault messages (predictors). The contribution of this work is to show how well the fault messages of aircraft systems can classify specific components failure modes. The training set contained the messages history from a fleet and the root causes of a butterfly valve reported by the maintenance stations. A cross-validation was performed in order to check the loss function value and to compare both methods performance. It is possible to see that the use of just fault messages for the valve failure classification provides results that close to 2/3 and could be used for faster troubleshooting procedures.

1 The current pressure across the entire aerospace industry to reduce operating costs and increase efficiency has arguably never been greater. Thus the need to improve parameters such as availability and reliability, and increase the tools and services associated with more efficient aircraft operations and sustainment is now paramount. Moreover, these improvements are seen by many as important factors that define the differentiation and competitiveness of not only current but also future aircraft fleets. The paper will focus on some of the opportunities for OEMs that arise from implementing Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) systems on their platforms and the challenges associated with evaluating the costs and benefits of their implementation and operation.