An emerging emphasis for the design and development of vehicle condition-based maintenance (CBM) systems amplifies its use for conducting vehicle maintenance based on evidence of need. This paper presents a systems engineering approach to creating an integrated vehicle health management (IVHM) architecture which places emphasis on the system's ultimate use to meet the operational needs of the vehicle and fleet maintainer, to collect data, conduct analysis, and support the decision-making processes for the sustainment and operations of the vehicle and assets being monitored.
The demand for a CBM system generally assumes that the asset being monitored is complex or that the operational use of the system demands complexity, timely response or that system failure has catastrophic results. Ground vehicles are such complex systems, which are the emphasis of this paper.
Developing the system architecture of such complex systems demands a systematic approach. In this paper a system engineering process is applied to a vehicle CBM system architecture development which takes into consideration the On-Vehicle (OnV)operational needs, the At-Vehicle (AtV) maintainer needs, and Off-Vehicle fleet manager and asset repair and logistics needs. The OnV CBM serves the vehicle operators real-time using alerts and fault status annunciation. It provides guidance for near real-time troubleshooting and maintenance actions and supports real-time operational and mission/flight/transport readiness assessment. The AtV CBM provides services to the maintainers for guided troubleshooting and LRU/component repair/replacement, when the vehicle is off a mission, partially operative or inoperative. The Off-Vehicle (OffV) CBM usually provides long term trending of the fleet information, the data repository for continuous CBM system improvement and support to logistic systems including spare parts and inventory management.
The CBM architecture development process which takes into consideration the use cases at the different user platforms is discussed in this paper.