Abstract:
he digital revolution in the latter part of the twentieth century has resulted in
the increased use and development of Cyber-Physical Systems. Two of which
are Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Integrated Vehicle Health
Management (IVHM). Both are relatively new areas of interest to academia,
military, and commercial organisations.
Designing IVHM for a UAS is no easy task – the complexity inherent in UAS,
with projects involving multiple partners/organisations; multiple stakeholders are
also interested in the IVHM. IVHM needs to justify itself throughout the life of the
UAS, and the lack of established knowledge makes it hard to know where to
start. The establishment and analysis of requirements for IVHM on UAS is
known to be important and costly – and for IVHM a complex one. There are
multiple stakeholders to satisfy and ultimately the needs of the customer, all
demanding different things from the IVHM, and with limited resources they need
to be prioritised. There are also many hindrances to this: differences in
language between stakeholders, customers failing to see the benefits,
scheduling conflicts, no operational data.
The contribution to knowledge in this thesis is the IVHM Requirements
Deployment (IVHM-RD) – a method for a designer of UAS IVHM to build a tool
which can consolidate and evaluate the various stakeholder’s requirements.
When the tool is subsequently populated with knowledge from individual
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), it provides a prioritised set of IVHM
requirements. The IVHM-RD has been tested on two design cases and
generalised for the use with other designs. Analysis of the process has been
conducted and in addition the results of the design cases have been analysed
in three ways: how the results relate to each design case, comparison between
the two cases, and how much the relationships between requirements are
understood. A validation exercise has also been conducted to establish the
legitimacy of the IVHM-RD process. This research is likely to have an impact on
the elicitation and analysis of IVHM requirements for UAS – and the wider
design process of IVHM. The IVHM-RD process should also prove of use to designers of IVHM on other assets. The populations of the design cases also
provide information which could be useful to other designer and future research.
