Architectures for Affordable Health Management

Affordable access to aircraft data and the integration of health management hardware and software into aircraft avionics systems are major hurdles to implementing condition based maintenance (CBM) for legacy and new aircraft. Avionics architectures are not design to support the acquisition and processing of data needed for advanced diagnostic, usage based lifing or prognostics capabilities that enable CBM. This paper examines the requirements to implement CBM including higher bandwidth sensor and control data from subsystems and approaches to capture, store, process and/or communication this data. Solution approaches include distributed processing, partitioning of support vs flight critical functions, health ready subsystems, and an open system approach. The impact of this approach on enterprise stakeholders and their potential role in the resulting business model is also discussed.