United Airlines In-Flight Wi-Fi Health Management: Revolutionizing Aircraft Connectivity through Real-time Prognostics and Big Data Analysis

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Published Nov 5, 2024
Ehsan Rahimi Shuang Ling Luis Mesen

Abstract

This paper highlights an innovative initiative, focusing on Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) to enhance in-flight Wi-Fi performance by proactively identifying aircraft component failures. We propose a novel metric, the Normalized Wi-Fi Health Score (NWiHS), alongside a corresponding alerting mechanism, which together represents a significant advancement in the evaluation and improvement of in-flight Wi-Fi connectivity. To achieve this goal, we utilized big data consisting of millions of historical Wi-Fi heartbeats (HBs) received from each aircraft over the past three years. These HBs refer to periodic data packet transmissions sent from United’s aircraft to ground stations, providing crucial real-time insights into the Wi-Fi system’s status.  Leveraging that data, we utilized advanced statistical methods to estimate a NWiHS - a robust indicator of aircraft-level connectivity performance, which quantifies the percent of missing Wi-Fi HBs normalized to exclude the effect of Wi-Fi provider performance and global coverage.

How to Cite

Rahimi, E., Ling, S., & Mesen, L. (2024). United Airlines In-Flight Wi-Fi Health Management: Revolutionizing Aircraft Connectivity through Real-time Prognostics and Big Data Analysis. Annual Conference of the PHM Society, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.36001/phmconf.2024.v16i1.3937
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Keywords

Wi-Fi, In-Flight, Big Data, Health, Analytics, Aircraft

References
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Section
Industry Experience Papers