A System of Systems Architecture for Optimizing Aircraft Health Management in Civil Aviation

This study proposes a system of systems (SoS) architecture for efficient aircraft health management (AHM) in civil aviation from the perspective of an aircraft manufacturer and formulates AHM as a multi-objective optimization problem. First, the SoS architecture is described to capture the interrelationship of the strategic capabilities required among the relevant stakeholders including airline customers, and the regulatory authority by using the Unified Architecture Framework (UAF). Parameters to measure strategic capabilities and operational activities are identified and the relationships between them are defined using parametric causal correlation. Next, AHM performance, effect, and amount of required data are formulated in terms of the identified variables in the SoS architecture description. Quantification enables the maximization of the effectiveness of AHM implementation by formulating it as a multi objective optimization problem, which allows for the quantitative assessment of the relationships between the context of AHM implementation and strategic capabilities. This formulation makes it possible to evaluate AHM effectiveness quantitatively, improving upon our previously proposed SoS architecture model, which only evaluated the relationship between stakeholders qualitatively.