Flexible Integrated Intelligent Network for Prognostic Health Management Systems

Weapons systems depend on the health of their components to perform reliably over extended periods of time. Maintenance is an important aspect of reliability, assuring equipment is available when needed. Trends toward electronic/networked information present opportunities to improve maintainer effectiveness, but new tools must be developed to manage interactions between the information sources and maintainers. AVNIK, with subcontract team member ISI, researched techniques for Flexible Integrated Intelligent Network (FIIN) for Prognostic Health Management (PHM) systems, based on the artificial intelligence field of cooperative multi-agent distributed work environments. AVNIK also developed prognostics algorithms using statistical anomaly detection and trend analysis. Our approach applies a multi-agent architecture to produce a distributed information management toolset framework enabling the sharing of system health information to aircrew members, aircraft to transmit inflight aircraft health/diagnostics information to ground crews for maintenance operations and allow for the prepositioning of assets and maintenance execution. These tools gather relevant information from diverse sources upon user request or autonomous notification, filter information, and format it for presentation to users.