Active Fault Diagnosis and Assessment for Aircraft Health Management

To address the NASA LaRC need for innovative methods and tools for the diagnosis of aircraft faults and failures, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop a new Active Integrated Diagnosis with Ensembles (AIDE) system, based on Bayesian network modeling, ensemble learning, and context-aware reasoning. This approach incorporates an active fault diagnosis system architecture, a block-level Bayesian-network-based context model, and a context-aware reasoning and severity assessment engine, which enable us to meet NASA aviation safety mission requirements for reliable and accurate diagnosis and assessment of adverse events with minimal uncertainty. The system offers constantly updated aircraft health context, which guides the active queries on aircraft health management systems to minimize the uncertainty along its progress path in the context model and make statistical inference and diagnosis, providing rank-ordered lists of diagnoses, severity assessments, and uncertainty measurements. In Phase I, POC will demonstrate the feasibility of active diagnosis of aircraft faults and failures by establishing context models and building and testing a preliminary prototype, which will demonstrate TRL-2 by the end of Phase I. Integration and validation issues will be explored through communication and collaboration with manufacturers. In Phase II, POC plans to develop a fully functional prototype, including software and supporting hardware, and demonstrate its fault diagnosis capability on a family of adverse events in the AirSTAR testbed. The results demonstrated will offer NASA the capabilities to diagnose and assess adverse events and improve aviation safety.

Non-NASA commercial applications of the AIDE system will include: vehicle engine diagnosis, mechanical system fatigue analysis for failure prevention in operations, and maintenance equipment reliability and failure predictions. AIDE can be integrated into truck platforms in commercial fleets for vehicle fault diagnosis. The AIDE can also be incorporated by General Electric into the next-generation and existing turbine engine blade and disk assessment processes, which will benefit from this proposed technology.

AIDE will find direct applications in the IVHM and other projects in the Aviation Safety Program, including the Integrated Intelligent Flight Deck (IIFD) Project, Aircraft Aging and Durability (AAD) Project, and Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control (IRAC) Project. Other programs and projects within ARMD that will benefit from AIDE include the Airspace Systems Program (ASP), Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD), and Joint Army Navy NASA Air Force (JANNAF).

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 2) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

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