scope:

This Aerospace Recommended Practice (ARP) provides insights on how to perform a cost versus benefit (C/B) analysis (CBA) to determine the return on investment that would result from implementing an integrated health management (HM) system on an air vehicle. The word "integrated" refers to the combination or "roll up" of sub-systems health management tools to create a platform-centric system. This document describes the complexity of features that can be considered in the analysis and the different tools and approaches for conducting a CBA, and it differentiates between military and commercial applications. This document is intended to help those who might not have a deep technical understanding or familiarity with HM systems but want to either quantify or understand the economic benefits (i.e., the value proposition) that an HM system could provide. Prognostics is a capability within some HM systems that provides an estimation of remaining useful life (RUL) or time to failure and so prognostic health management (PHM) is used where this predictive element exists. IVHM refers to an integrated vehicle level system deployed on a fleet of platforms and might, but not necessarily, include predictive elements.

Purpose

This ARP is not a standard or legal document because the approaches towards the end objective are many and varied. The document has been compiled to help the increasing number of people who want to compute an HM CBA prior to implementing such a system on a platform.

Approach

The approach taken was to identify the parameters that were relevant for consideration in a cost/benefit analysis so that the boundaries of a specific problem could be defined from the outset. Several recent and worthy papers presented at conferences on the subject matter were studied and as much information as possible was obtained from the aerospace manufacturers and the DoD to identify tools and techniques that they might have used to good effect. The various methods were assessed by the SAE HM-1 Technical Committee team for their application to specific scenarios (e.g., military or commercial operation, legacy or new engines) and the parameters utilized by each scenario. The end result is a document that offers the reader various solution paths so that the one most appropriate to the specific situation can be used or adapted.