A Method to Support the Requirements Trade-Off of Integrated Vehicle Health Management for Unmanned Aerial Systems

摘要

he digital revolution in the latter part of the twentieth century has resulted inthe increased use and development of Cyber-Physical Systems. Two of whichare Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) and Integrated Vehicle HealthManagement (IVHM). Both are relatively new areas of interest to academia,military, and commercial organisations.Designing IVHM for a UAS is no easy task – the complexity inherent in UAS,with projects involving multiple partners/organisations; multiple stakeholders arealso interested in the IVHM. IVHM needs to justify itself throughout the life of theUAS, and the lack of established knowledge makes it hard to know where tostart. The establishment and analysis of requirements for IVHM on UAS isknown to be important and costly – and for IVHM a complex one. There aremultiple stakeholders to satisfy and ultimately the needs of the customer, alldemanding different things from the IVHM, and with limited resources they needto be prioritised. There are also many hindrances to this: differences inlanguage between stakeholders, customers failing to see the benefits,scheduling conflicts, no operational data.The contribution to knowledge in this thesis is the IVHM RequirementsDeployment (IVHM-RD) – a method for a designer of UAS IVHM to build a toolwhich can consolidate and evaluate the various stakeholder’s requirements.When the tool is subsequently populated with knowledge from individualSubject Matter Experts (SMEs), it provides a prioritised set of IVHMrequirements. The IVHM-RD has been tested on two design cases andgeneralised for the use with other designs. Analysis of the process has beenconducted and in addition the results of the design cases have been analysedin three ways: how the results relate to each design case, comparison betweenthe two cases, and how much the relationships between requirements areunderstood. A validation exercise has also been conducted to establish thelegitimacy of the IVHM-RD process. This research is likely to have an impact onthe elicitation and analysis of IVHM requirements for UAS – and the widerdesign process of IVHM. The IVHM-RD process should also prove of use to designers of IVHM on other assets. The populations of the design cases alsoprovide information which could be useful to other designer and future research.