Active Avionics and HUMS Integrated System Architecture

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Increasingly stringent demands in reducing emissions to the environment result in added aircraft system complexity. This imposes further pressures on the in-flight operation status and maintenance that may have direct effect on the costs and more importantly on passenger safety. This call for proposals has wisely identified the high priority requirement for a single active system distributed around the airframe that will provide the interconnectivity and control of all active systems . It is therefore highly desirable to provide a simple, reliable and long term solution to manage the aircraft system avionics through an integrated embedded network architecture that can serve end systems (for example: sensors, actuators, services, pilots, controls, engines, interfaces, diagnostics etc) efficiently & reliably, while reducing maintenance and logistics support.The proposed programme is considered as the Initial Assessment Phase (IAP) with one year duration. It is expected that the IAP will establish the basis of further investigations and larger scale technology demonstrators (by the VRC and/or other R&D organisations) to verify and validate the IAP results. There are two major areas where this IAP project identifies for investigation. The first is the research of avionics architecture, and the second is the Health and Usage Monitoring System (HUMS) sub-system architecture. The electronic network architecture can be considered as the spinal cord of the airborne vehicle. It is the means of interconnecting its end systems and it has to comply with all the complex requirements of an aircraft. The HUMS refers to the on and off-board processing of aircraft sub-systems data, resulting in an accurate and conclusive indication of the health and usage status of various airborne systems, including avionics. It is hence, the sub-system that monitors the critical parts of the aircraft system that determine its operation and configuration.It is of the utmost importance to have a robust, flexible, scalable and reliable avionics architecture that can be efficiently developed, actively operated, and maintained. This Network Enabling Capability architecture is necessary to enable the use of HUMS which can ultimately provide an accurate aircraft environment representation for active adaptation to the operational environment. Furthermore, the single/generic integrated avionics system architecture approach, as described in the case for support, can offer the capability of supporting future avionics technologies as well as the plug-n-play capability for existing technologies.It is certainly very demanding to provide such capabilities as the overall system can become extremely complicated. On the other hand, the research targets are very challenging with the risk of having a demonstrator not complex enough to represent closely the reality. It is however anticipated that the research strategy adopted with the IAP, and having close dialogue with Airbus and latest technology providers, the risk will be reduced having furthermore the potential of even being able to transfer the research to an early exploitation stage.The benefits can be substantial. By using this technology the aircraft would have reduced platform weight, and be able to adapt to environmental conditions. This implies that aircraft would fly much more efficiently and hence, reduce their fuel consumption requirements. This will certainly benefit Airbus, its passengers, and the wider world with reduced CO2 emissions.The full proposal document depicts the way this project proposes to identify how avionic systems can be partitioned in a highly modular way such that a tightly controlled network communication system can serve, monitor, and provide the capability to configure end systems reliably while in operation.