Integrating IVHM and Asset Design

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) describes a set of capabilities that enable effective and efficient maintenance and operation of the target vehicle. It accounts for the collection of data, conducting analysis, and supporting the decision-making process for sustainment and operation. The design of IVHM systems endeavours to account for all causes of failure in a disciplined, systems engineering, manner. With industry striving to reduce through-life cost, IVHM is a powerful tool to give forewarning of impending failure and hence control over the outcome. Benefits have been realised from this approach across a number of different sectors but, hindering our ability to realise further benefit from this maturing technology, is the fact that IVHM is still treated as added on to the design of the asset, rather than being a sub-system in its own right, fully integrated with the asset design. The elevation and integration of IVHM in this way will enable architectures to be chosen that accommodate health ready sub-systems from the supply chain and design trade-offs to be made, to name but two major benefits. Barriers to IVHM being integrated with the asset design are examined in this paper. The paper presents progress in overcoming them, and suggests potential solutions for those that remain. It addresses the IVHM system design from a systems engineering perspective and the integration with the asset design will be described within an industrial design process

Integrating IVHM and asset design

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) describes a set of capabilities that enable effective and efficient maintenance and operation of the target vehicle. It accounts for the collecting of data, conducting analysis, and supporting the decision-making process for sustainment and operation. The design of IVHM systems endeavours to account for all causes of failure in a disciplined, systems engineering, manner. With industry striving to reduce through-life cost, IVHM is a powerful tool to give forewarning of impending failure and hence control over the outcome. Benefits have been realised from this approach across a number of different sectors but, hindering our ability to realise further benefit from this maturing technology, is the fact that IVHM is still treated as added on to the design of the asset, rather than being a sub-system in its own right, fully integrated with the asset design. The elevation and integration of IVHM in this way will enable architectures to be chosen that accommodate health ready sub-systems from the supply chain and design trade-offs to be made, to name but two major benefits. Barriers to IVHM being integrated with the asset design are examined in this paper. The paper presents progress in overcoming them, and suggests potential solutions for those that remain. It addresses the IVHM system design from a systems engineering perspective and the integration with the asset design will be described within an industrial design process

Use of COTS functional analysis software as an IVHM design tool for detection and isolation of UAV fuel system faults

This paper presents a new approach to the development of health management solutions which can be applied to both new and legacy platforms during the conceptual design phase. The approach involves the qualitative functional modelling of a system in order to perform an Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) design – the placement of sensors and the diagnostic rules to be used in interrogating their output. The qualitative functional analysis was chosen as a route for early assessment of failures in complex systems. Functional models of system components are required for capturing the available system knowledge used during various stages of system and IVHM design. MADe™ (Maintenance Aware Design environment), a COTS software tool developed by PHM Technology, was used for the health management design. A model has been built incorporating the failure diagrams of five failure modes for five different components of a UAV fuel system. Thus an inherent health management solution for the system and the optimised sensor set solution have been defined. The automatically generated sensor set solution also contains a diagnostic rule set, which was validated on the fuel rig for different operation modes taking into account the predicted fault detection/isolation and ambiguity group coefficients. It was concluded that when using functional modelling, the IVHM design and the actual system design cannot be done in isolation. The functional approach requires permanent input from the system designer and reliability engineers in order to construct a functional model that will qualitatively represent the real system. In other words, the physical insight should not be isolated from the failure phenomena and the diagnostic analysis tools should be able to adequately capture the experience bases. This approach has been verified on a laboratory bench top test rig which can simulate a range of possible fuel system faults. The rig is fully instrumented in order to allow benchmarking of various sensing solution for fault detection/isolation that were identified using functional analysis

Enhancing the EAST-ADL error model with HiP-HOPS semantics

EAST-ADL is a domain-specific modelling language for the engineering of automotive embedded systems. The language has abstractions that enable engineers to capture a variety of information about design in the course of the lifecycle — from requirements to detailed design of hardware and software architectures. The specification of the EAST-ADL language includes an error model extension which documents language structures that allow potential failures of design elements to be specified locally. The effects of these failures are then later assessed in the context of the architecture design. To provide this type of useful assessment, a language and a specification are not enough; a compiler-like tool that can read and operate on a system specification together with its error model is needed. In this paper we integrate the error model of EAST-ADL with the precise semantics of HiP-HOPS — a state-of-the-art tool that enables dependability analysis and optimization of design models. We present the integration concept between EAST-ADL structure and HiP-HOPS error propagation logic and its transformation into the HiP-HOPS model. Source and destination models are represented using the corresponding XML formats. The connection of these two models at tool level enables practical EAST-ADL designs of embedded automotive systems to be analysed in terms of dependability, i.e. safety, reliability and availability. In addition, the information encoded in the error model can be re-used across different contexts of application with the associated benefits for cost reduction, simplification, and rationalisation of dependability assessments in complex engineering designs

Mental Health in the Workplace: Situation Analyses, Germany

[From Introduction] The ILO’s primary goals regarding disability are to prepare and empower people with disabilities to pursue their employment goals and facilitate access to work and job opportunities in open labour markets, while sensitising policy makers, trade unions and employers to these issues. The ILO’s mandate on disability issues is specified in the ILO Convention 159 (1983) on vocational rehabilitation and employment. No. 159 defines a disabled person as an individual whose prospects of securing, retaining, and advancing in suitable employment are substantially reduced as a result of a duly recognised physical or mental impairment. The Convention established the principle of equal treatment and employment for workers with disabilities

DPN -- Dependability Priority Numbers

This paper proposes a novel model-based approach to combine the quantitative dependability (safety, reliability, availability, maintainability and IT security) analysis and trade-off analysis. The proposed approach is called DPN (Dependability Priority Numbers) and allows the comparison of different actual dependability characteristics of a systems with its target values and evaluates them regarding trade-off analysis criteria. Therefore, the target values of system dependability characteristics are taken as requirements, while the actual value of a specific system design are provided by quantitative and qualitative dependability analysis (FHA, FMEA, FMEDA, of CFT-based FTA). The DPN approach evaluates the fulfillment of individual target requirements and perform trade-offs between analysis objectives. We present the workflow and meta-model of the DPN approach, and illustrate our approach using a case study on a brake warning contact system. Hence, we demonstrate how the model-based DPNs improve system dependability by selecting the project crucial dependable design alternatives or measures

SSME lifetime prediction and verification, integrating environments, structures, materials: The challenge

The planned missions for the space shuttle dictated a unique and technology-extending rocket engine. The high specific impulse requirements in conjunction with a 55-mission lifetime, plus volume and weight constraints, produced unique structural design, manufacturing, and verification requirements. Operations from Earth to orbit produce severe dynamic environments, which couple with the extreme pressure and thermal environments associated with the high performance, creating large low cycle loads and high alternating stresses above endurance limit which result in high sensitivity to alternating stresses. Combining all of these effects resulted in the requirements for exotic materials, which are more susceptible to manufacturing problems, and the use of an all-welded structure. The challenge of integrating environments, dynamics, structures, and materials into a verified SSME structure is discussed. The verification program and developmental flight results are included. The first six shuttle flights had engine performance as predicted with no failures. The engine system has met the basic design challenges

Sharing Human-Generated Observations by Integrating HMI and the Semantic Sensor Web

Current “Internet of Things” concepts point to a future where connected objects gather meaningful information about their environment and share it with other objects and people. In particular, objects embedding Human Machine Interaction (HMI), such as mobile devices and, increasingly, connected vehicles, home appliances, urban interactive infrastructures, etc., may not only be conceived as sources of sensor information, but, through interaction with their users, they can also produce highly valuable context-aware human-generated observations. We believe that the great promise offered by combining and sharing all of the different sources of information available can be realized through the integration of HMI and Semantic Sensor Web technologies. This paper presents a technological framework that harmonizes two of the most influential HMI and Sensor Web initiatives: the W3C’s Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) with its semantic extension, respectively. Although the proposed framework is general enough to be applied in a variety of connected objects integrating HMI, a particular development is presented for a connected car scenario where drivers’ observations about the traffic or their environment are shared across the Semantic Sensor Web. For implementation and evaluation purposes an on-board OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) architecture was built, integrating several available HMI, Sensor Web and Semantic Web technologies. A technical performance test and a conceptual validation of the scenario with potential users are reported, with results suggesting the approach is soun