Aircraft engines are designed to be used during several tens of years. Their
maintenance is a challenging and costly task, for obvious security reasons. The
goal is to ensure a proper operation of the engines, in all conditions, with a
zero probability of failure, while taking into account aging. The fact that the
same engine is sometimes used on several aircrafts has to be taken into account
too. The maintenance can be improved if an efficient procedure for the
prediction of failures is implemented. The primary source of information on the
health of the engines comes from measurement during flights. Several variables
such as the core speed, the oil pressure and quantity, the fan speed, etc. are
measured, together with environmental variables such as the outside
temperature, altitude, aircraft speed, etc. In this paper, we describe the
design of a procedure aiming at visualizing successive data measured on
aircraft engines. The data are multi-dimensional measurements on the engines,
which are projected on a self-organizing map in order to allow us to follow the
trajectories of these data over time. The trajectories consist in a succession
of points on the map, each of them corresponding to the two-dimensional
projection of the multi-dimensional vector of engine measurements. Analyzing
the trajectories aims at visualizing any deviation from a normal behavior,
making it possible to anticipate an operation failure.Comment: Communication pr\'esent\'ee au 7th International Workshop WSOM 09, St
Augustine, Floride, USA, June 200