FORMULATION OF A PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE MESSAGE RELATING TO THE FUNCTIONAL DEGRADATIONS OF AN AIRCRAFT

• US 20080215194A1
• Filed: 12/07/2007
• Published: 09/04/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 12/08/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Thales SA
• Original Assignee: Thales SA
• Inventors: Fournier, Francois, Sannino, Christian, Bailly, Carine
• Granted Patent: US 8,126,597 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 701/3
• CPC Class Codes: G05B 23/0283 Predictive maintenance, e.g. involving the monitoring of a system and, based on the monitoring results, taking decisions on the maintenance schedule of the monitored system; Estimating remaining useful life [RUL] preventive maintenance, i.e. planning maintenance according to the available resources without monitoring the system G06Q10/06

Abstract

A method of preventive maintenance is disclosed for an aircraft. The aircraft includes components, including items of equipment of the aircraft and/or electronic modules and/or physical links. The lifetime information for the components is known. The aircraft also includes means for monitoring the components, a centralized maintenance system, and means for estimating the life time of the components. The aircraft carries out a set of functions, each being ensured by a chain of components. The method comprises several steps including, a first step of locating the degradations of the items of equipment, a second step making it possible to allocate the located degradations to the various functions of the aircraft, a third step of estimating the lifetime of the functions identified in the second step, and a fourth step of formulating the maintenance message constructed on the basis of the previous steps.

Claims

1. A method of preventive maintenance for an aircraft, the aircraft including:

components, the components including items of equipment of the aircraft and/or electronic modules and/or physical links, wherein the lifetime information for the components is known, the aircraft further including;

means for monitoring the components,

a centralized maintenance system,

a digital database,

calculation means for computing a function for estimating the life time of the components,

an alarms manager,

and display means,

and the aircraft carrying out a set of functions, each of the functions being ensured by a chain of components, the method comprising the steps of;

locating, by the monitoring means, the degradations of at least one item of equipment;

allocating the located degradations to the various functions of the aircraft on the basis of the database comprising the list of components and the functional architecture of the aircraft;

estimating the lifetime of the functions identified in the allocating step on the basis of the life time estimation function; and

formulating the preventive maintenance message, the latter being constructed on the basis of the previous steps and of an alarms manager, the message comprising degradation information linked with the various functions of the aircraft as well as an estimate of the lifetime of at least one function.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the degradations relate to the environmental degradations pertaining to temperature, vibrations or hygrometry, as well as the degradations of signals transmitted or received by a component.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein the degradations are located by threshold overshoots, the thresholds being defined, according to the nature of each of the degradations, by a predefined scale of numerical values.

4. The method according to claim 1, further comprising collecting and archiving the preventive maintenance messages, is carried out by the centralized maintenance system.

5. The method according to claim 2, wherein a degradation information cue generated by the centralized maintenance system, is transmitted to the display means, the degradation information cue comprising the functional degradation information and estimated lifetime information for at least one function.

6. The method according to claim 1, wherein the estimated lifetime of a function is the minimum lifetime of a set of components, each component being indispensable to the realization of the function.

7. A maintenance device intended for a set of electronic or mechanical items of equipment comprising a centralized maintenance system making it possible to correlate the maintenance message formulated by the method of claim 2 with fault reports.

8. The device according to claim 7, wherein an alarm message is generated by the alarm manager destined for the pilot when a function has been identified possessing a failure probability exceeding a predefined threshold.