NASA integrated vehicle health management technology experiment for X-37

The NASA Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) Technology Experiment for X-37 was intended to run IVHM software on board the X-37 spacecraft. The X-37 is an unpiloted vehicle designed to orbit the Earth for up to 21 days before landing on a runway. The objectives of the experiment were to demonstrate the benefits of in-flight IVHM to the operation of a Reusable Launch Vehicle, to advance the Technology Readiness Level of this IVHM technology within a flight environment, and to demonstrate that the IVHM software could operate on the Vehicle Management Computer. The scope of the experiment was to perform real-time fault detection and isolation for X-37's electrical power system and electro-mechanical actuators. The experiment used Livingstone, a software system that performs diagnosis using a qualitative, model-based reasoning approach that searches system-wide interactions to detect and isolate failures. Two of the challenges we faced were to make this research software more efficient so that it would fit within the limited computational resources that were available to us on the X-37 spacecraft, and to modify it so that it satisfied the X-37's software safety requirements. Although the experiment is currently unfunded, the development effort resulted in major improvements in Livingstone's efficiency and safety. This paper reviews some of the details of the modeling and integration efforts, and some of the lessons that were learned.