The Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) Centre is a joint effort by industry and academia to develop state-of-the-art capabilities that change the way services are provided today. The IVHM Centre was launched by Cranfield University, Britain’s premier postgraduate, research-intensive university, together with Boeing, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Meggitt and Thales in 2008. It is located at our Cranfield site. The Centre is now globally recognised, having defined the subject area, and is further developing new areas of expansion. The development of the Centre, along with other areas in the University, significantly contributed to the recent £65m Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre (DARTeC) proposal success. Through DARTeC, the IVHM Centre will be leading the MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) developments and activities with expertise and capabilities in UAV robotics NDT inspections, SHM sensor monitoring, and advanced digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twins (DT), tools that could be used to synchronize, monitor, and improve all processes related to aircraft MRO.
IVHM is the unified capability of systems to assess the current or future state of the member system health and integrate that picture of system health within a framework of available resources and operational demand. It is a very wide-reaching capability, encompassing: business cases and models; legislation, certification and standards; architecture and design; as well as algorithms for prognostics, diagnostics and reasoning.
The IVHM Centre supports commercialisation, reducing time to market and combine technology, business and technology transfer solutions. We have a robust innovation cycle and applied research demonstrators with access to a world-class IVHM community and new market opportunities, which influence development of industry standards and policies.