Prognostics As-A-Service: A Scalable Cloud Architecture for Prognostics: A Scalable Cloud Architecture for Prognostics

Abstract

Comprehensive aircraft system health-state awareness is crit- ical for maintaining safe, efficient growth in global oper- ations, enabling higher levels of autonomy, and facilitat- ing new forms of aviation. Maintainers, vehicle operators, air traffic controllers, dispatchers, pilots, autonomous sys- tems, and other decision-makers must have reliable real-time knowledge of the vehicle health, the health of its critical com- posite systems, predictions of how health changes with time, and forecasts of how its capabilities change with health degra- dation to preserve safety and efficiency. Providing this infor- mation in a reliable manner in computationally constrained environments and across a wide range of vehicles and sys- tems continues to be a challenge. This challenge can be par- tially resolved through cloud computing, where the execu- tion of prognostic and diagnostic algorithms is performed on a network of remote servers hosted on the internet. NASA is developing a cloud computing service, Prognostics As-A- Service (PaaS), that explores the feasibility and challenges of cloud-enhanced prognostics. Though such a system has broad applicability, this research effort is focused on aviation applications.