A Generic and Scalable Pipeline for Large-Scale Analytics of Continuous Aircraft Engine Data

Abstract

A major application of data analytics for aircraft engine manufacturers is engine health monitoring, which consists in improving availability and operation of engines by leveraging operational data and past events. Traditional tools can no longer handle the increasing volume and velocity of data collected on modern aircraft. We propose a generic and scalable pipeline for large-scale analytics of operational data from a recent type of aircraft engine, oriented towards health monitoring applications. Based on Hadoop and Spark, our approach enables domain experts to scale their algorithms and extract features from tens of thousands of flights stored on a cluster. All computations are performed using the Spark framework, however custom functions and algorithms can be integrated without knowledge of distributed programming. Unsupervised learning algorithms are integrated for clustering and dimensionality reduction of the flight features, in order to allow efficient visualization and interpretation through a dedicated web application. The use case guiding our work is a methodology for engine fleet monitoring with a self-organizing map. Finally, this pipeline is meant to be end-to-end, fully customizable and ready for use in an industrial setting.