Development and Flight Testing of an Adaptive Vehicle Health-Monitoring Architecture

AbstractDevelopment and testing of an adaptable vehicle health-monitoring architecture is presented. Thearchitecture is being developed for a fleet of vehicles. It has three operational levels: one or more remotedata acquisition units located throughout the vehicle; a command and control unit located within thevehicle; and, a terminal collection unit to collect analysis results from all vehicles. Each level is capable ofperforming autonomous analysis with a trained expert system. The expert system is parameterized, whichmakes it adaptable to be trained to both a user's subject reasoning and existing quantitative analytic tools.Communication between all levels is done with wireless radio frequency interfaces. The remote dataacquisition unit has an eight channel programmable digital interface that allows the user discretion forchoosing type of sensors; number of sensors, sensor sampling rate and sampling duration for each sensor.The architecture provides framework for a tributary analysis. All measurements at the lowest operationallevel are reduced to provide analysis results necessary to gauge changes from established baselines. Theseare then collected at the next level to identify any global trends or common features from the prior level.This process is repeated until the results are reduced at the highest operational level. In the framework,only analysis results are forwarded to the next level to reduce telemetry congestion. The system's remotedata acquisition hardware and non-analysis software have been flight tested on the NASA Langley B757'smain landing gear. The flight tests were performed to validate the following: the wireless radio frequencycommunication capabilities of the system, the hardware design, command and control; software operation;and, data acquisition, storage and retrieval.iii

[1]  F. Yuan,et al.  SPONSORING / MONITORING AGENCY NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES) , 1999 .

[2]  C. H. Rollins Electromagnetic compatibility testing for the NASA Langley Research Center Boeing 757-200 , 2001, 20th DASC. 20th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (Cat. No.01CH37219).