ASP projects

IPROS: An integrated prognostics and logistic support system for the engines of an aircraft fleet

The IPROS project addresses an issue of growing importance: that of maximizing up time equipment while minimizing maintenance and operating costs. The area of intelligent maintenance and prognostic-enabled condition-based maintenance of machinery is a vital one for today’s complex systems in industry, aerospace vehicles, ships, automotive industry, and elsewhere. As manning levels are reduced and equipment becomes more complex, intelligent maintenance schemes must replace the old pre-scheduled and labor intensive planned maintenance systems in order to ensure that equipment continues to function. While fault detection effectiveness with very low false-alarm rates continues to improve, prognosis requirements are more ambitious and present very significant challenges to system design teams. Prognostics has the potential to be very beneficial in terms of both reduced operational and support cost and life-cycle total ownership cost of many types of machinery and systems. The evolution of diagnostic and monitoring systems for aircraft and other complex systems has led to the recognition that predictive prognosis is both desirable and technically possible. The objective of the IPROS project was to perform a feasibility study of an engine health monitoring and support system integrating engine prognostics directly into the logistics pipeline. Although different critical engine parts were analyzed, the effort was primarily focused on the engine gearbox since valuable data for this engine component were made available by the industrial sponsor. A knowledge-based system was defined as one capable of generating and integrating multiple information in order to efficiently assess the health of an engine, activate the logistic support chain and minimize the life cycle cost.
The research project was presented at the first international conference of the PHM society where it was well accepted and its merits recognized. The IPROS project addressed an aircraft engine, but its synergistic approach to health monitoring technologies, integrated reasoning capabilities, interpretation of fault-detect outputs, reliability assessment, maintenance and product support practices can serve as a paradigm for similar initiatives in other systems: from industrial machineries to food processing plants, from railways to marine applications.

Principal Academic Tutor
Giovanni Jacazio
Mechanics, Politecnico di Torino

Academic Tutors
Stefano Beretta
Mechanics, Politecnico di Milano
Lorenzo Borello
Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Torino
Fiorenzo Franceschini
Production Systems and Business Economics, Politecnico di Torino
Stefano Pastorelli
Mechanics, Politecnico di Torino
Paolo Rocco
Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano
Matteo Rossi
Electronics and Information, Politecnico di Milano
Massimo Sorli
Mechanics, Politecnico di Torino

External institution
AVIO

External Tutor
Franco Tortarolo
Avio

Team members
TEAM A
Dejan Markovic [Team controller], Telecommunications Engineering
Stefano Alneri, Automotive Engineering
Giusy Cannone [Project Communication Coordinator], Industrial Engineering and Management
Marco Maurizio Dondi, Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
Lucrece Urielle Mekogue Dongue, Electronic Engineering

TEAM B
Mattia Gabriele Vismara [Team controller], Mechanical Engineering
Federico Canova, Industrial Engineering and Management
Daniele Cavaglieri, Mechanical Engineering
Francesca Licandro, Industrial Engineering and Management
Bojan Markovic, Electronic Engineering
Giuseppe Randazzo, Automotive Engineering

Download the poster of the Project