Multi-Domain Modeling and Simulation of an Aircraft System for Advanced Vehicle-Level Reasoning Research and Development

In this paper, we describe a simulation based health monitoring system test-bed for aircraft systems. The purpose of the test-bed is to provide a technology neutral basis for implementing and evaluation of reasoning systems on vehicle level and software architecture in support of the safety and maintenance process. This simulation test-bed will provide the sub-system level results and data which can be fed to the VLRS to generate vehicle level reasoning to achieve broader level diagnoses. This paper describes real-time system architecture and concept of operations for the aircraft major sub-systems. The four main components in the real-time test-bed are the aircraft sub-systems (e.g. battery, fuel, engine, generator, heating and lighting system) simulation model, fault insertion unit, health monitoring data processing and user interface. In this paper, we adopted a component based modelling paradigm for the implementation of the virtual aircraft systems. All of the fault injections are currently implemented via software. The fault insertion unit allows for the repeatable injection of faults into the system. The simulation test-bed has been tested with many different faults which were undetected on system level to process and detect on the vehicle level reasoning. This article also shows how one system fault can affect the overall health of the vehicle. Keywords—Intelligent Reasoning; Finite State Machines; Aircraft System Simulation; Multi-Physics; Real-Time Simulation, VLRS (Vehicle Level Reasoning System); HM (Health Management)