System Analysis of Prognostics and Health Management Systems for Future Transport Aircraft

This paper provides a lifecycle analysis of the use of prognostic systems in future or present aircraft. By simulating aircraft operation and maintenance and modeling resulting costs and revenues it gives a profound economic assessment of a technology implementation. The proposed method uses component specific failure distribution functions derived from inservice data to model component failure behavior and includes performance levels of prognostic systems to account for imperfect sensor systems or prognostic algorithms. The study demonstrates that Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) systems for a selected aircraft system can enable a significant reduction of unscheduled events, leading to additional aircraft utilization and an increase in net present value (NPV) of up to 0.48 % in case of a perfect PHM system. It is shown that many factors influence whether the implementation of PHM for a specific system may be beneficial in the end.