A Digital Twin-Based Approach for the Fault Diagnosis and Health Monitoring of a Complex Satellite System

Abstract

The ever-increasing functional density and complexity of the satellite systems, the harsh space flight environment, as well as the cost reduction measures that require less operator involvement are increasingly driving the need to develop new approaches for fault diagnosis and health monitoring (FD-HM). The data-driven FD-HM approaches use signal processing or data mining to obtain implicit information for the operating state of the system, which is good at monitoring systems extensively and shallowly and is expected to reduce the workload of the operators. However, these approaches for the FD-HM of the satellite system are driven primarily by the historical data and some static physical data, with little consideration for the simulation data, real-time data, and data fusion between the two, so it is not fully competent for the real-time monitoring and maintenance of the satellite in orbit. To ensure the reliable operation of the complex satellite systems, this paper presents a new physical–virtual convergence approach, digital twin, for FD-HM. Moreover, we present an FD-HM application of the satellite power system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.