Dear Colleagues,

There have been rapid advancements in aircraft technology, such as in supersonic aircraft, civil aircrafts, and advanced fighter jets. The performance and reliability requirements of such aircrafts are high, requiring an increased focus on the reliability evaluation and health management of systems. The reliability analyses and health evaluations of aircraft systems are thus complex and inherently multidisciplinary processes, involving several disciplines ranging from aerodynamics, propulsion, structures, electric/hydraulic systems, and guidance to navigation and control, each including different groups of highly experienced experts and advanced high-fidelity simulation models. Therefore, it is imperative to develop new and efficient approaches to enable performing suitable health monitoring and reliability design analyses of advanced aircrafts. When it comes to these approaches and techniques, a large range of mathematical algorithms blossom to face up to the challenges induced by aerospace system design and simulation.

We plan to launch this Special Issue in your journal. This Special Issue will focus on the current state-of-the-art, latest advances, and future trends of aircrafts reliability and health management. The key objective is to improve the performance, reliability, safety, airworthiness, and maintainability of aircrafts and aero-engines, by overcoming relevant key technical and scientific issues. The aircraft structures include fuselage cover, wing structure, undercarriage, aero-engine structures or components (i.e., aero-engine fan, compressor, combustor, turbine, blade, casings, and other components), and other related components in an aircraft system. The topics of this Special Issue might include, but are not limited to, structural or system optimization, reliability evaluation analysis, fatigue analysis and design, lifetime analysis (or prediction) and design, faults monitoring and diagnosis, operation and maintenance, seaworthiness, safety evaluation, and health management, etc. This Special Issue welcomes theoretical, analytical, and experimental investigations on aircraft structures and systems. These contributions will advance the body of knowledge and its applications for structural/system health monitoring, optimization and reliability design with respect to the structural dynamics, nonlinear vibrations, time series modeling techniques, strategies of aerospace systems, mathematical modeling methods, computer simulation technologies, reliability-based design optimization techniques, multidisciplinary optimization approaches, and other related algorithms and new applications in aircraft reliability and health management.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Health monitoring technologies for aircraft flight condition;
• Evaluation models and approaches of aero-engine operation status;
• Detection, modeling and prediction methods of the crack, failure/fault, fatigue and lifetime of systems and components;
• Optimization design methods for assembled structures (or multi-component systems), and a single structure (component) of aircraft;
• The optimization strategy and algorithm, multidisciplinary simulation approach and surrogate modeling technique, in optimization and reliability design of structures and systems;
• Advanced probabilistic analysis and design methods for aircraft structures including parameter influential analysis, sensitivity analysis, and reliability-based design optimization methods;
• The applications of emerging technologies and algorithms in aircraft system analysis, such as big data analytics, cloud computing, intelligent algorithm, etc. In particular, we look into their applications in the analysis, simulation, and modeling for structural optimization and reliability design;
• Decision support and simulation-based optimization and reliability design which contribute to improve the performance and reliability of aircraft and structures;
• Maintenance/reliability/safety/airworthiness modeling and optimization based on new theory, method and technology

Prof. Dr. Cheng-Wei Fei
Dr. Zhixin Zhan
Prof. Dr. Behrooz Keshtegar
Prof. Dr. Yunwen Feng
Guest Editors

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• aircraft system
• performance evaluation
• reliability design
• modeling and simulation
• health management
• operation and maintenance