Design of Vehicle Health Management Processor for Real-Time Failure Analysis of Avionic Systems PhD

This research aims to explore and develop a novel processor, as a single Integrated Circuit (IC), architected specifically to fulfil all the required computations needed for IVHM within a Heterogeneous Distributed System design (HDS).

Even with the latest advances in current technology, aviation electronics is facing with various reliability and security issues arising from either working in harsh environment and weaknesses in embedded electronics. It causes serious problems and dangers in different avionic applications fitted to aircraft, satellites, and spacecraft to perform individual functions varied from communications, navigation, display, management, and hundreds of other systems.

Lots of efforts have been already put toward Integration of System Health Management, IVHM, to mainly overcome reliability issues by the creation of a predictable maintenance solution. IVHM requires a transformation of system data into information to support operational decisions and optimise maintenance by facilitating system prognostics, diagnostics, self-healing and self-management techniques.

The success of IVHM depends on extensive research and engineering directed to redesign and re-architect existing infrastructure used for avionics. The proposed processor would be the core of IVHM system, integrated with each avionic system to perform the necessary local programming and computations. It also provides communication with IVHM processors of other systems in the hierarchy of HDS and multi-agent system. Hence, IVHM processor is a generic system that enhances each avionic application with failure prediction, detection and effective self-healing/repair and self-management capabilities while providing the required interfacings and communications.

The student will have the opportunity to work with experts in the prognostics and condition monitoring field, as well as being part of our active and dynamic research centre at Cranfield.

The Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) Centre is a major collaborative venture at Cranfield, started in 2008, with funding from the East of England Development Agency (EEDA). EEDA is a consortium of core industrial partners, (Boeing, BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Meggitt, Thales, MOD and Alstom); and from EPSRC. The investment, over the first five years of operation, was approaching £10M. We are now in our eighth year of exploitation, and the Centre has grown into other sectors including rail, energy, health and agriculture. The centre is financially self-sustaining; many of the partners (and others) are funding Applied Research projects, and there is a growing revenue from EPSRC, TSB and EU funded work.