Recovery act funds NASA's aviation safety program is conducting research directed at improving the safety of current and future aircraft operating in the national airspace system. The research focus…

This federal contract award, valued at $2,086,395.00, was issued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Langley Research Center to The Boeing Company's Engineering, Test & Technology Division. The contract supports NASA's Aviation Safety Program, specifically the Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) project, which is conducting research to develop a Vehicle-Level Reasoning System (VLRS) that can detect, diagnose, predict, and mitigate adverse events during aircraft flight. The VLRS will leverage component, subsystem, and vehicle-level models to enable condition-based maintenance and improve aircraft safety. This contract is not set aside for small businesses. The Boeing Company, as the prime contractor, may leverage its extensive expertise in areas such as aeronautics, systems engineering, and composites to deliver innovative solutions to NASA under this research and development effort.

Recovery act funds NASA's aviation safety program is conducting research directed at improving the safety of current and future aircraft operating in the national airspace system. The research focus is on the way vehicles are designed, built, operated, and maintained, and is organized into four project areas: 1) integrated vehicle health management, 2) integrated intelligent flight deck, 3) integrated resilient aircraft control, and 4) aircraft aging and durability. This research statement of work specifically addresses the integrated vehicle health management (ivhm) project which is conducting research into vehicle health management technologies that will detect, diagnose, predict, and mitigate adverse events that occur during flight. Adverse events include those that arise from system, subsystem, or component faults or failures due to damage, degradation, or environmental hazards (such as turbulence, electromagnetic fields, and lightning). In particular, this effort seeks to develop a vehicle-level reasoning system (vlrs) that will look across all of the vehicle subsystems (propulsion, flight systems, airframe, and software) for purposes of determining whether an adverse event has occurred, diagnose the cause, predict the effect on the remaining useful life of the vehicle, and take appropriate steps to mitigate the event as appropriate. The vlrs may take advantage of component, subsystem, and vehicle level models which would represent connectivity and potential causal chains of failure. Similarly, physics-based models of damage propagation for certain subsystems (such as the airframe or actuators) may be appropriate for inclusion in the vlrs. Vlrs technologies will produce a significant amount of data that can be used to enable conditioned-based maintenance (CBM) for aircraft. With CBM, maintenance actions are performed only when there is an anticipated need, as opposed to regularly scheduled maintenance actions. In order to anticipate the need for maintenance, a CBM system will use information and data derived from onboard sensors and supporting instrumentation (such as those under development in NASA's ivhm project) as well as maintenance logs for the vehicle. This statement of work is the result of proposal 09-IVHM1-09-0009 submitted by the boeing company for award under the NASA headquarters aeronautics research mission directorate (armd) NASA research announcement (NRA) NNH09ZEA001N entitled, research opportunities in aeronautics 2009, amendment 1, subtopic b.4, project integrated vehicle health management (ivhm), topic vehicle-level reasoning system / evaluation of multidisciplinary ivhm technologies, tools, and techniques. NASA's aviation safety program is conducting research directed at improving the safety of current and future aircraft operating in the national airspace system. The research focus is on the way vehicles are designed, built, operated, and maintained, and is organized into four project areas: 1) integrated vehicle health management, 2) integrated intelligent flight deck, 3) integrated resilient aircraft control, and 4) aircraft aging and durability. This research statement of work specifically addresses the integrated vehicle health management (ivhm) project which is conducting research into vehicle health management technologies that will detect, diagnose, predict, and mitigate adverse events that occur during flight. Adverse events include those that arise from system, subsystem, or component faults or failures due to damage, degradation, or environmental hazards (such as turbulence, electromagnetic fields, and lightning).