Aircraft engine fleet monitoring using self-organizing maps and edit distance

Abstract

Aircraft engines are designed to be used during several tens of years. Ensuring a proper operation of engines over their lifetime is therefore an important and difficult task. The maintenance can be improved if efficient procedures for the understanding of data flows produced by sensors for monitoring purposes are implemented. This paper details such a procedure aiming at visualizing in a meaningful way successive data measured on aircraft engines and finding for every possible request sequence of data measurement similar behaviour already observed in the past which may help to anticipate failures. The core of the procedure is based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) which are used to visualize the evolution of the data measured on the engines. Rough measurements can not be directly used as inputs, because they are influenced by external conditions. A preprocessing procedure is set up to extract meaningful information and remove uninteresting variations due to change of environmental conditions. The proposed procedure contains four main modules to tackle these difficulties: environmental conditions normalization (ECN), change detection and adaptive signal modeling (CD), visualization with Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) and finally minimal Edit Distance search (SEARCH). The architecture of the procedure and of its modules is described in this paper and results on real data are also supplied. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.