Modeling and Simulation Support for System of Systems Engineering Applications

Chapter 6System Health Management

Stephen B. Johnson^1,2

¹ Dependable System Technologies, LLC and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO, USA

² National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, AL, USA

6.1 INTRODUCTION

Systems health management (SHM) addresses what might be considered the “dark side” of Systems Engineering. That is, for every goal, objective, or requirement (see the definition of these terms in the following), there is the possibility that this goal will not be achieved. SHM refers to the collection of methods, processes, procedures, designs, and design attributes of a system that ensure that the system can achieve all or some of its goals despite potential or actual failures. As such, it encompasses aspects of many historic, existing subfields. These include safety; reliability; availability; maintainability; failure (or fault) detection, isolation, and response (or recovery) (FDIR); fault or failure tolerance; vehicle health management (HM); prognostics; diagnostics; and dependability. SHM is the aspect of “resilience engineering” that deals with failures of the system itself, whether from internal or external causes, as opposed to aspects of the environment that an otherwise “healthy” system cannot successfully accommodate or address (Hollnagel et al., 2006).

Since a system of systems (SoS) has goals that it intends to achieve, the possibility of failure to achieve these goals exists for SoSs as much as for systems. ...