When good diagnostics go bad - Why maturation is still hard

Maturation is a vital, integral, difficult, and oft-overlooked part of the Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) and Integrated Diagnostics (ID) processes. The effort to mature a system begins at conceptual design and continues throughout the system life cycle. Once initial system designs have been deployed and begun operation, they must be monitored for correctness and effectiveness within the context of their operational environment. In this paper I will: (1) discuss maturation as an integral part of the IVHM and ID processes, (2) suggest an integrated information framework based on a logical theory of product usage that supports innovative maturation application development, (3) present some of the issues that present technical and organizational impediments to obtaining and representing the knowledge required for development of maturation applications, (4) describe how the approach presented here can address some of these issues, and (5) discuss declarative knowledge representation and application development approaches to address the peculiar demands of the maturation domain. The ideas presented will support development of flexible, growth-oriented applications suitable to support product usage analysis throughout the operational portion of its life cycle.