Abstract
Integrated Health Management technology is the emerging paradigm in system supervision and maintenance area, and it
is the key to achieving true condition-based maintenance. But this task is complicated by the extremely large amount of
the data available, the existence of uncertainties, and interactive engineering system operational conditions. Therefore, it
is reasonable to research the health information fusion technology to achieve better performance and a higher level of
autonomy for IHM system. This paper analyses the requirements of the information fusion in an IHM system, describes
the fusion application areas, proposes the Health Sensing Unit (HSU) concept, and designs the distributed hierarchical
fusion architecture. Using the confidence distance matrix as the measure of HSU's performance, this paper proposes a
fusion algorithm to fuse multiple HSUs' output, and figure out the system health index according to the maximum
likelihood principle. The simulation result yields conclusive evidence that fusion can be very valuable in the IHM
technology for the system supervision and maintenance.
