Big data analytics with deep learning approach have attracted increasing attention in transportation engineering, involving operations, maintenance, and safety. In commercial aviation sectors, operational, and maintenance data produced on modern aircraft is increasing exponentially, and predictive analysis of these data is an exciting and promising field in aviation maintenance, which has a potential to revolutionize aerospace maintenance industry. This study illustrates the state-of-the-art applications of deep learning in big data analytics for predictive maintenance and a real-world case study for commercial aircraft. A Long Short-Term Memory network based Auto-Encoders (LSTM-AE) is proposed for complex aircraft system fault detection and classification, which makes use of the raw time-series data from heterogeneous sensors. The proposed method uses nominal time-series samples corresponding to healthy behavior of the system to learn a reconstruction model based on LSTM-AE framework. Then the system health index (HI) and fault feature vectors are derived from the reconstruction error matrix for fault detection and classification. The proposed method is demonstrated on a real-world data set from a commercial aircraft fleet. The typical PCV faults as well as the 390 F sensor and 450 F sensor faults due to sense line air leakage are successfully detected and distinguished based on the extracted features. The case study results show that the computed HI can effectively characterize the health state of the aircraft system and different fault types can be identified with high confidence, which is helpful for line fault troubleshooting.

This paper addresses the issues of fault diagnosis of the environmental control system of a certain commercial aircraft model of which the environmental control system has a high failure rate in field and causes many unplanned maintenance events. Because of the complexity and reciprocal compensation mechanism of the environmental control system, it is difficult to carry out fault isolation timely once the failure occurred during aircraft turnaround time, which thus may cause flight delay or even cancelation. The original contribution of this work is to propose a Bayesian network–based fault diagnosis method for commercial aircraft environmental control system where a multi-information fusion mechanism is used to incorporate the system first principle, expert experience and condition monitoring data. It incorporates extraction technology of sensor feature parameters and the structural learning of Bayesian network to realize the effective diagnosis of multiple faults. A case study is conducted based on a data set from a commercial aircraft fleet. The results show that the fault isolation ratio of this method is greater than 89%. The proposed Bayesian fault diagnosis network method can be used as a troubleshooting tool for airline maintenance technicians in fault isolation of environmental control system, reducing the time spent on-line troubleshooting and aircraft downtime.

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The data measured by the pitot tube (PT) is related to airspeed indication and flight safety. However, there are few methods to solve the problem of failure prediction and predictive maintenance of PT. This study proposes a method for predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of the PT based on dynamic operating data. First, an exposure index (EI) characterizing the severity level of operating conditions is proposed based on multiple dynamic operating and environmental parameters, then a cumulative exposure model (CEM) is developed to calculate the cumulative exposure. Dynamic covariate information is incorporated into the time-to-failure distribution of PT through the CEM, the RUL distribution of the individual PT is then obtained by Monte Carlo simulation. A case study is carried out based on actual data of a commercial aircraft fleet and shows that the proposed CEM can effectively use historical aircraft environmental information and truncated failure data of the components. The relative error of the remaining life prediction is substantially improved compared to the traditional reliability analysis methods, which means that the proposed model can provide more reliable RUL results based on historical operating conditions, providing better support for PT risk assessment and condition-based maintenance decisions.