A Study on Systems Health Management and the Prioritization of Future Requirements: a Safety Perspective

A health management (HM) system is responsible for information gathering about a system’s health and corresponding decision-making. HM systems are typically used to identify any degradation in performance that may affect safety or successful operations of a system. Effective long term development of successful health management solutions requires an improved understanding of the relationship between potential adverse events that may happen during flight, and validated tools, technologies, and techniques developed for mitigating their negative effects on system safety and functionality. This paper presents a study on the assessment of future requirements for systems health management technologies and related research areas, and the results of a casual factor analysis based upon a systematic study of aircraft accident and incident data. The gist of the paper is the mapping between SHM technologies and causal factors developed with the goal of prioritizing future SHM requirements in order to improve safety margins. The goal of the study is to identify key research areas in systems health management and to recommend specific technology needs to support the development of integrated system health management tools, technologies, and techniques that will address safety related challenges facing current and future aircraft systems.