Method and computer program for the maintenance aid of aircraft equipment

• US 9,767,413 B2
• Filed: 07/25/2014
• Issued: 09/19/2017
• Est. Priority Date: 07/31/2013
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Airbus, Airbus Operations (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company EADS NV)
• Original Assignee: Airbus, Airbus Operations (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company EADS NV)
• Inventors: Huet, Jean-Max, Besseau, Stphane, Maillard, Bruno, Michaud, Franois
• Primary Examiner(s): Hill, Stanley K
• Assistant Examiner(s): Lee, Tsu-Chang
• Application Number:
  US14/341,272
• Publication Number:
  US 20150039551A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,152 Days
• CPC Class Codes: G05B 2219/45071 Aircraft, airplane, ship cleaning manipulator, paint stripping
• 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
• CPC Class Codes: G06N 7/00 Computing arrangements based on specific mathematical models

Abstract

According to a first aspect, the subject matter disclosed herein relates to a decision aid method for maintenance operations of aircraft equipment, the aircraft including a maintenance system arranged to make a record of equipment failure messages and of equipment failure warning messages emitted during a flight, the method comprising extracting at least one combination of failure messages corresponding to failure messages recorded by the maintenance system during a flight and a set of previous flights; determining, as a function of the at least one extracted combination, a probability of occurrence of at least one warning message possibly accompanied by one or more failure messages.

Claims

1. A decision aid method for maintenance operation of aircraft equipment, the aircraft comprising a maintenance system arranged to make a record of one or more equipment failure messages and equipment failure warning messages emitted during a flight, the method comprising:

extracting, by at least one processor, at least one combination of failure messages corresponding to failure messages recorded by the maintenance system during a flight and a set of previous flights; and

determining, by the at least one processor, as a function of the at least one extracted combination, a probability of occurrence of at least one warning message, wherein;

warning messages are represented as nodes of a directed graph stored in computer memory comprising a set of arcs each provided with a transition probability from one warning message to another, each warning message of the directed graph corresponding to a given sequence of failure messages;

the at least one extracted combination corresponds to the sequence formed by the failure messages recorded during the flight and the set of previous flights;

the extracted sequence is represented as a mix of warning messages; and

the determining a probability of occurrence comprises calculating, by the at least one processor, a probability of occurrence of each of the warning messages of the graph made by a random walk on the graph initialized by the representation of the extracted sequence.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the random walk on the graph is a teleportation walk characterised by a probability a of following the probabilistic transition arcs of the graph and a probability (1−

α

) of skipping evenly randomly to a node of the graph.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein a warning message of the graph corresponds to a given sequence of failure messages recorded before the occurrence of the warning message since the occurrence of a previous warning message.

4. The method according to claim 1, comprising classifying warning messages of the graph taking into consideration an aircraft operating profile related to the warning messages.

5. A computer program product comprising code instructions for running steps of the method according to claim 1, when the program is run on a computer.