How can active HUMS safeguard towards the increasing complexity of avionics?

Abstract

The civil aviation industry has expanded considerably in aircraft systems in the 100 years of its life. Although there are major developments in all aspects of flight, the fastest growing trend is for More electric aircraft (MEA) and low emissions; consequently, the complexity of electrical and electronic systems is increasing. It is therefore highly desirable to provide a simple, reliable, and sustainable solution to manage the aircraft system avionics through an integrated embedded network architecture that can serve end systems efficiently & reliably, while reducing maintenance and logistics support. Current health and usage monitoring systems (HUMS) are focused on detecting faults in components that are subject to vibration and rotation, mainly in order to prevent accidents due to mechanical failure. HUMS however could be extended to monitor other aircraft parameters, using a combination of flight data and equipment/component profiles. Beyond this, HUMS could also have a more interactive role to provide augmented system safety. Preventing and detecting faults could be extended to actually performing fault recovery actions such as partially reconfiguring individual sub-systems, a technology proposed as active HUMS. In addition, one should move towards a strategy that allows defence line of development (DLoD), including operation, maintenance and logistics operations, with minimum impact to the aircrafts' availability and down time. This paper provides an insight in implementing these technologies, including how active HUMS addresses DLoDs, and concludes with a discussion on enterprise architecture (EA) and future work aspects. (5 pages)