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Predictive Maintenance Required for H-60 Helicopters

May 19, 2020

photo illus. H-60 by US AIR FORCE — An HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter lands as an Army UH-60 Blackhawk prepares to pick up a medivac patient June 13. The 33rd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron is the first squadron to have a combat-search-and-rescue mission and a medevac mission, and is based at Kandahar, Afghanistan. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Brian Ferguson)

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Predictive maintenance methods help determine the condition of in-service equipment in order to estimate when maintenance should be performed. This is especially important in the aircraft systems field. The Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is looking for ideas on how to improve the way it can use artificial intelligence technologies to predict when the Defense Department’s thousands of planes, helicopters, and unmanned aerial vehicles need maintenance and repairs.

According to the JAIC’s request for information from industry, academia and other agencies, the Center has run into challenges in its pathfinder project using AI to predict maintenance on H-60 helicopters and their T700 engines.

Those challenges include “the accuracy and completeness of historical aircraft data,” developing models trained on historical outputs and applying them to real-time data for real-time predictions.

The JAIC is seeking “a partner to advance these efforts to achieve timely and trusted model outputs that accurately predict engine maintenance and servicing,” the RFI states.

The JAIC seeks a partner to assist in the data collection, curation, and connection to produce holistic and historical data on each H-60 aircraft. The partner should develop and train AI models on that historical and holistic data to accurately predict the probability of a condition requiring a maintenance action on the engines. A visual representation of model output should be provided to maintainers and planners, which will include the integration with existing reporting tools and dashboards.

“The partner will train models on this data to predict common engine issues, work with JAIC Test and Evaluation, assist with creating automated near real-time data inputs, provide methods for field units to access the model,..” etc,the RFI states, according to defenseone.com.