Verification of PHM capabilities: A joint customer/industrial perspective

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) will be an evolution of the built-in test and health monitoring used on current aircraft. The principal technical element of this evolution has been the transition from health monitoring to health management. This introduces prognostic capabilities, whereby the onset of failure is identified and managed, higher levels of data fusion and information fusion and related capabilities such as autonomic logistics. This paper looks at some of the issues associated with the verification of the PHM capabilities, highlighting the technical challenges and potential solutions to them. It starts by discussing the different ways in which a PHM system is expected to be used. It then identifies how the way in which the PHM is applied affects its performance needs and the criticality of those performance needs. This is used to examine how the performance needs drive the verification requirements. Finally, the paper examines the current state of technologies to establish their ability to meet these verification requirements and discusses how these are influenced by Smart Acquisition and the changing roles within the sector.