Reliability and Health Management for Aerospace Utility Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Aircraft utility systems are essential onboard systems that provide power, control, environmental support, and safety functions, enabling safe and efficient flight operations. As aircraft and spacecraft transition toward more-electric and all-electric architectures, these systems are taking on increasingly safety-critical roles while operating under extreme thermal, vibration, and loading conditions. System failures can directly compromise mission success and crew safety. Consequently, ensuring high reliability and enabling predictive health management for aircraft utility systems has become a pressing engineering challenge. Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) offers a systematic framework to continuously assess health status, diagnose incipient faults, predict remaining useful life, and trigger fault-tolerant or maintenance actions. Yet, aerospace electro-mechanical systems pose unique difficulties: coupled multi-physics degradation, scarce fault data, long-lifetime validation, and stringent certification requirements. This Special Issue aims to showcase original research that bridges reliability engineering, multi-physics modeling, and data-driven intelligence to advance the health management of aircraft utility systems. We kindly invite contributions that develop novel reliability models, diagnostic and prognostic algorithms, fault-tolerant control strategies, digital-twin-enabled health assessment, or intelligent maintenance strategies for aircraft utility systems. By bringing together expertise from mechanical, electrical, and control engineering with the reliability and PHM communities, this Special Issue aspires to foster safer, more reliable, and intelligently maintained next-generation aerospace vehicles.

Prof. Dr. Chao Zhang
Prof. Dr. Xingjian Wang
Dr. Rentong Chen
Dr. Yuwei Zhang
Guest Editors

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