Formulation of a preventive maintenance message relating to the functional degradations of an aircraft

• US 8,126,597 B2
• Filed: 12/07/2007
• Issued: 02/28/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 12/08/2006
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Thales SA
• Original Assignee: Thales SA
• Inventors: Bailly, Carine, Sannino, Christian, Fournier, François
• Primary Examiner(s): Black, Thomas
• Assistant Examiner(s): MARC-COLEMAN, MARTHE Y
• Application Number:
  US11/952,478
• Publication Number:
  US 20080215194A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,544 Days
• Field of Search: 701/29, 701/3, 702/36, 702/184, 340/500
• 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 for an aircraft, the aircraft having 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:

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

a monitoring unit for monitoring the components,

a centralized maintenance system,

a digital database,

an aircraft functional architecture contained in the digital database, said aircraft functional architecture specifying for each function of the functional architecture links between the respective function and the components which are needed to carry out the respective function;

calculation unit for computing a function for estimating lifetime of the components,

an alarm manager, and

a display unit,

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

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

allocating the located degradations to at least one of the set of the functions of the aircraft on the basis of the links in the aircraft functional architecture;

estimating a lifetime of the at least one of the set of the functions in the allocating step on the basis of the lifetime estimation function; and

formulating a preventive maintenance message, the preventive maintenance message being constructed on the basis of the previous steps and of an alarms manager, the message comprising functional degradation information linked with the at least one of the set of the functions of the aircraft and estimated lifetime information of the at least one of the set of the functions.

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

3. The method according to claim 2, wherein a degradation information cue generated by the centralized maintenance system, is transmitted to the display unit, the degradation information cue comprising the functional degradation information and estimated lifetime information for at least one of the set of the functions.

4. A maintenance device intended for a set of electronic or mechanical items of equipment to correlate the preventive maintenance message formulated by the method of claim 2 with fault reports using the centralized maintenance system.

5. The device according to claim 4, wherein an alarm message is generated by an alarm manager destined for a pilot when a function has been identified possessing a failure probability exceeding a predefined threshold.

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

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

8. The method according to claim 1, wherein the estimated lifetime of the at least one of the set of the functions is a minimum lifetime of a set of components, each component being indispensable to a realization of the at least one of the set of the functions.