Determination of Cost Benefits from Implementing an Integrated Vehicle Health Management System

This ARP provides insights on how to perform a cost benefit analysis (CBA) to determine the return on investment that would result from implementing an integrated Health Management (HM) system on an air vehicle. The word “integrated” refers to the combination or “roll up” of sub-systems health management tools to create a platform centric system. The document describes the complexity of features that can be considered in the analysis, the different tools and approaches for conducting a CBA and differentiates between military and commercial applications. This document is intended to help those who might not necessarily have a deep technical understanding or familiarity with HM systems but want to either quantify or understand the economic benefits (i.e., the value proposition) that a HM system could provide. Prognostics is a capability within some HM systems that provides an estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) or time to failure and so Prognostic Health Management (PHM) is used where this predictive element exists. IVHM refers to an integrated vehicle level system deployed on a fleet of platforms and might, but not necessarily, include predictive elements.