An evidence-based approach to damage location on an aircraft structure

International audienceThis paper discusses the use of evidence-based classifiers for the identification of damage. In particular, a neural network approach to Dempster-Shafer theory is demonstrated on the damage location problem for an aircraft wing. The results are compared with a probabilistic classifier based on a multi-layer perceptron neural network and shown to give similar results. The question of fusing classifiers is considered and it is shown that a combination of the Dempster-Shafer and MLP classifiers gives a significant improvement over the use of individual classifiers for the aircraft wing data

Proceedings of Abstracts Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference 2019

© 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For further details please see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Note: Keynote: Fluorescence visualisation to evaluate effectiveness of personal protective equipment for infection control is © 2019 Crown copyright and so is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Under this licence users are permitted to copy, publish, distribute and transmit the Information; adapt the Information; exploit the Information commercially and non-commercially for example, by combining it with other Information, or by including it in your own product or application. Where you do any of the above you must acknowledge the source of the Information in your product or application by including or linking to any attribution statement specified by the Information Provider(s) and, where possible, provide a link to this licence: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/This book is the record of abstracts submitted and accepted for presentation at the Inaugural Engineering and Computer Science Research Conference held 17th April 2019 at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. This conference is a local event aiming at bringing together the research students, staff and eminent external guests to celebrate Engineering and Computer Science Research at the University of Hertfordshire. The ECS Research Conference aims to showcase the broad landscape of research taking place in the School of Engineering and Computer Science. The 2019 conference was articulated around three topical cross-disciplinary themes: Make and Preserve the Future; Connect the People and Cities; and Protect and Care

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

A state-of-the-art review of non-destructive testing image fusion and critical insights on the inspection of aerospace composites towards sustainable maintenance repair operations

Non-destructive testing (NDT) of aerospace structures has gained significant interest, given its non-destructive and economic inspection nature enabling future sustainable aerospace maintenance repair operations (MROs). NDT has been applied to many different domains, and there is a number of such methods having their individual sensor technology characteristics, working principles, pros and cons. Increasingly, NDT approaches have been investigated alongside the use of data fusion with the aim of combining sensing information for improved inspection performance and more informative structural health condition outcomes for the relevant structure. Within this context, image fusion has been a particular focus. This review paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the recent progress and development trends in NDT-based image fusion. A particular aspect included in this work is providing critical insights on the reliable inspection of aerospace composites, given the weight-saving potential and superior mechanical properties of composites for use in aerospace structures and support for airworthiness. As the integration of NDT approaches for composite materials is rather limited in the current literature, some examples from non-composite materials are also presented as a means of providing insights into the fusion potential

Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for Information Fusion (Collected Works), Vol. 4

The fourth volume on Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for information fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics. The contributions (see List of Articles published in this book, at the end of the volume) have been published or presented after disseminating the third volume (2009, http://fs.unm.edu/DSmT-book3.pdf) in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals. First Part of this book presents the theoretical advancement of DSmT, dealing with Belief functions, conditioning and deconditioning, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Decision Making, Multi-Criteria, evidence theory, combination rule, evidence distance, conflicting belief, sources of evidences with different importance and reliabilities, importance of sources, pignistic probability transformation, Qualitative reasoning under uncertainty, Imprecise belief structures, 2-Tuple linguistic label, Electre Tri Method, hierarchical proportional redistribution, basic belief assignment, subjective probability measure, Smarandache codification, neutrosophic logic, Evidence theory, outranking methods, Dempster-Shafer Theory, Bayes fusion rule, frequentist probability, mean square error, controlling factor, optimal assignment solution, data association, Transferable Belief Model, and others. More applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the third book of DSmT 2009. Subsequently, the second part of this volume is about applications of DSmT in correlation with Electronic Support Measures, belief function, sensor networks, Ground Moving Target and Multiple target tracking, Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Device, Belief Interacting Multiple Model filter, seismic and acoustic sensor, Support Vector Machines, Alarm classification, ability of human visual system, Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Evaluation Framework, Threat Assessment, Handwritten Signature Verification, Automatic Aircraft Recognition, Dynamic Data-Driven Application System, adjustment of secure communication trust analysis, and so on. Finally, the third part presents a List of References related with DSmT published or presented along the years since its inception in 2004, chronologically ordered

Diagnostic and prognostic analysis tools for monitoring degradation in aged structures

This research addresses the problem of prolonging the life of aged structures of historical value that have already outlived their original designed lives many times. While a lot of research has been carried out in the field of structural monitoring, diagnostics and prognostics for high tech industries, this is not the case for historical aged structures. Currently most maintenance projects for aged structures have focused on the instrumentation and diagnostic techniques required to detect any damage with a certain degree of success. This research project involved the development of diagnostic and prognostic tools to be used for monitoring and predicting the ‘health’ of aged structures. The diagnostic and prognostic tools have been developed for the monitoring of Cutty Sark iron structures as a first application. The concept of canary and parrot sensor devices are developed where canary devices are small, accelerated devices, which will fail according to similar failure mechanisms occurring in an aged structures and parrot devices are designed to fail at the same rate as the structure, thus mimicking the structure. The model-driven prognostic tool uses a Physics-of-Failure (PoF) model to predict remaining life of a structure. It uses a corrosion model based on the decrease in corrosion rate over time to predict remaining life of an aged iron structures. The data-driven diagnostic tool developed uses Mahalanobis Distance analysis to detect anomalies in the behaviour of a structure. Bayesian Network models are then used as a fusion method, integrating remaining life predictions from the model-driven prognostic tool with information of possible anomalies from data-driven diagnostic tool to provide a probability distribution of predicted remaining life. The diagnostics and prognostic tools are validated and tested through demonstration example and experimental tests. This research primarily looks at applying diagnostic and prognostic technologies used in high-tech industries to aged iron structures. In order to achieve this, the model-driven and data-driven techniques commonly used had to be adapted taking into consideration the particular constraints of monitoring and maintaining aged structures. The fusion technique developed is a novel approach for prognostics for aged structures and provides the flexibility often needed for diagnostic and prognostic tools

Uncertainty in Engineering

This open access book provides an introduction to uncertainty quantification in engineering. Starting with preliminaries on Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo methods, followed by material on imprecise probabilities, it then focuses on reliability theory and simulation methods for complex systems. The final two chapters discuss various aspects of aerospace engineering, considering stochastic model updating from an imprecise Bayesian perspective, and uncertainty quantification for aerospace flight modelling. Written by experts in the subject, and based on lectures given at the Second Training School of the European Research and Training Network UTOPIAE (Uncertainty Treatment and Optimization in Aerospace Engineering), which took place at Durham University (United Kingdom) from 2 to 6 July 2018, the book offers an essential resource for students as well as scientists and practitioners

CONFIDENCE-BASED DECISION-MAKING SUPPORT FOR MULTI-SENSOR SYSTEMS

We live in a world where computer systems are omnipresent and are connected to more and more sensors. Ranging from small individual electronic assistants like smartphones to complex autonomous robots, from personal wearable health devices to professional eHealth frameworks, all these systems use the sensors’ data in order to make appropriate decisions according to the context they measure. However, in addition to complete failures leading to the lack of data delivery, these sensors can also send bad data due to influences from the environment which can sometimes be hard to detect by the computer system when checking each sensor individually. The computer system should be able to use its set of sensors as a whole in order to mitigate the influence of malfunctioning sensors, to overcome the absence of data coming from broken sensors, and to handle possible conflicting information coming from several sensors. In this thesis, we propose a computational model based on a two layer software architecture to overcome this challenge. In a first layer, classification algorithms will check for malfunctioning sensors and attribute a confidence value to each sensor. In the second layer, a rule-based proactive engine will then build a representation of the context of the system and use it along some empirical knowledge about the weaknesses of the different sensors to further tweak this confidence value. Furthermore, the system will then check for conflicting data between sensors. This can be done by having several sensors that measure the same parameters or by having multiple sensors that can be used together to calculate an estimation of a parameter given by another sensor. A confidence value will be calculated for this estimation as well, based on the confidence values of the related sensors. The successive design refinement steps of our model are shown over the course of three experiments. The first two experiments, located in the eHealth domain, have been used to better identify the challenges of such multi-sensor systems, while the third experiment, which consists of a virtual robot simulation, acts as a proof of concept for the semi-generic model proposed in this thesis

Prognostics and health management for maintenance practitioners - Review, implementation and tools evaluation.

In literature, prognostics and health management (PHM) systems have been studied by many researchers from many different engineering fields to increase system reliability, availability, safety and to reduce the maintenance cost of engineering assets. Many works conducted in PHM research concentrate on designing robust and accurate models to assess the health state of components for particular applications to support decision making. Models which involve mathematical interpretations, assumptions and approximations make PHM hard to understand and implement in real world applications, especially by maintenance practitioners in industry. Prior knowledge to implement PHM in complex systems is crucial to building highly reliable systems. To fill this gap and motivate industry practitioners, this paper attempts to provide a comprehensive review on PHM domain and discusses important issues on uncertainty quantification, implementation aspects next to prognostics feature and tool evaluation. In this paper, PHM implementation steps consists of; (1) critical component analysis, (2) appropriate sensor selection for condition monitoring (CM), (3) prognostics feature evaluation under data analysis and (4) prognostics methodology and tool evaluation matrices derived from PHM literature. Besides PHM implementation aspects, this paper also reviews previous and on-going research in high-speed train bogies to highlight problems faced in train industry and emphasize the significance of PHM for further investigations

Study of the dependencies between in-service degradation and key design parameters with uncertainty for mechanical components.

The design features of machine components can impact significantly in its life while in-service, and only relatively few studies which are case specific have been undertaken with respect to this. Hence, the need for more understanding of the influence of geometric design features on the service life of a machine component. The aim of this research is to develop a methodology to assess the degradation life of a mechanical component due to geometric design influence in the presence of uncertainties and its application for the optimisation of the component in the presence of these uncertainties. This thesis has proposed a novel methodology for assessing the thermal fatigue life, a degradation mechanism based on the influence of design features in the presence of uncertainties. In this research a novel uncertainty analysis methodology that is able to handle simultaneously the presence of aleatory and epistemic uncertainties is proposed for a more realistic prediction and assessment of a components thermal fatigue degradation life estimated using finite element analysis. A design optimisation method for optimising the components design in the presence of mixed uncertainty, aleatory and epistemic uncertainties is also proposed and developed. The performance of the proposed methodology is analysed through the use of passenger vehicle brake discs. The novel uncertainty quantification methodology was initially applied on a solid brake disc, and validated for generalisability using a vented brake disc which has more complex design features. While the optimisation method as proposed was applied on the vented brake disc. With these this research proposes a validated set of uncertainty and optimisation methodology in the presence of mixed uncertainties for a design problem. The methodologies proposed in this research provide design engineers with a methodology to design components that are robust by giving the design with the least uncertainty in its output as result of design parameters inherent variability while simultaneously providing the design with the least uncertainty in estimation of its life as a result of the use of surrogate models.PhD in Manufacturin