A discussion on fault prognosis/prediction and health monitoring techniques to improve the reliability of aerospace and automotive systems 2018-36-0316

Currently, aerospace and automotive industries are developing complexand/or highly integrated systems, whose services require greater confidence to meet a set of specifications that are increasingly demanding, such as successfully operating a communications satellite, a commercial airplane, an automatic automobile, and so on. To meet these requirements and expectations, there is a growing need for fault treatment, up to predict faults and monitor the health of the components, equipment, subsystems or systems used. In the last decades, the approaches of 1) Fault Prevention, 2) Fault Detection/Tolerance and 3) Fault Detection/Correction have been widely studied and explored. Now, also due to the increasing power of computation and communication and their decreasing prices and lead times, the 4) Fault Prognosis/Prediction and Health Monitoring Approach (PHM) is a rising subject in the scientific and engineering community, demanding methodologies that allow us to increase system reliability, availability, maintainability (RAM), productivity, mission autonomy and reduce operational delays and costs. So: This paper presents a discussion on fault prognosis/prediction and health monitoring techniques to improve the reliability of aerospace and automotive systems. To do that, it: 1) reviews the literature on the fields of fault prognosis/prediction and health monitoring of aerospace and automotive systems; 2) summarize some reports of cases, highlighting the tools and methodologies used; 3) briefly compare them with the other 3 approaches for fault treatment; 4) include a list of published or on-going related standards; 5) discuss their applicability to aerospace and automotive systems, aiming to stimulate their application and identify research and development opportunities in these fields. Based on all this, we expect to show that the application of fault prognosis/prediction and health monitoring techniques to components, equipment, subsystems or systems can: 1) provide significant gains in terms of analysis, decision-making and anticipation of faults; 2) increase system reliability, availability, maintainability (RAM), productivity, mission autonomy and reduce operational delays and costs in the aerospace and automotive industries;3) shortly and mainly, avoid system failures.

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