An integrated reasoning framework for vehicle level diagnosis of aircraft subsystem faults

A framework for integrated diagnostic reasoning to detect and isolate faults in complex aircraft systems, at the vehicle level, is proposed. A Digital Twin emulating the functions of an aircraft’s selected subsystems is to be developed; this will include their input/output parameters connecting to other systems, for simulating the subsystem level interactions. The failure propagation across subsystems will be observed by injecting different faults. A diagnostic module for each subsystem will detect and isolate faults. This will be complemented by an integrated reasoner at the vehicle level which will isolate the root cause of propagated faults. On successful completion, the fully developed integrated reasoner shall distinguish an effect (for example, engine power reduction in B777 (Sleight and Carter, 2014)) from its root cause (blocked Fuel Oil Heat Exchanger (Sleight and Carter, 2014)), yielding maintenance savings and increasing dispatch reliability.