Developing IVHM Requirements for Aerospace Systems

The term Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) describes a set of capabilities that enable sustainable and safe operation of components and subsystems within aerospace platforms. However, very little guidance exists for the systems engineering aspects of design with IVHM in mind. It is probably because of this that designers have to use knowledge picked up exclusively by experience rather than by established process. This motivated a group of leading IVHM practitioners within the aerospace industry under the aegis of SAE’s HM-1 technical committee to author a document that hopes to give working engineers and program managers clear guidance on all the elements of IVHM that they need to consider before designing a system. This proposed recommended practice (ARP6883 [1]) will describe all the steps of requirements generation and management as it applies to IVHM systems, and demonstrate these with a “real-world” example related to designing a landing gear system. The team hopes that this paper and presentation will help start a dialog with the larger aerospace community and that the feedback can be used to improve the ARP and subsequently the practice of IVHM from a systems engineering point-of-view.