Data Management Backbone for Embedded and PC-based Systems Using OSA-CBM and OSA-EAI

Cassidian is in the process of developing a comprehensive simulation framework for integrated system health monitoring and management research and development. One significant building block is to invite 1st class technology providers, e.g. Universities and SMIs, to provide innovative technologies and support their integration into the simulation framework. This paper is a joint presentation of Cassidian and Linova Software GmbH, a Cassidian preferred software provider. Prognostic Health Management (PHM) systems are commonly composed of disparate and distributed hardand software components. Further, these components exchange vast amounts of data over a heterogeneous collection of communication channels. Any such system’s success depends upon an open, uniform, and performance-optimized solution for data management. A solution that includes: data definition, data communication, and data storage. The Open System Architecture for Condition-based Maintenance (OSA-CBM) and Open System Architecture for Enterprise Application Integration (OSA-EAI) are complementary reference architectures and represent an emerging standard for application domain-independent asset and condition data management. Herein, we will report on our experiences while implementing a data management backbone based on OSA-CBM and OSA-EAI for a simulation environment supporting PHM systems in the aerospace domain. Our work encompasses both airborne embedded systems and ground-based PC systems. While we can generally confirm the feasibility of OSA-CBM and OSA-EAI, we found several implementation recommendations unsuited to realtime operating conditions. To address these issues, we propose work towards standardizing non-XML-based transportation formats for OSA-CBM data packets. Further, we discovered issues specific to implementing the OSA-EAI data model in the aerospace domain. These issues drove our proposal to extend the OSA-EAI database model, where we seek to optimize its usability for analytical tasks. To underline the feasibility of our solutions, we provide empirical evidence drawn from our work. The conclusion is a summary of our experience and the direction of future work in the area of PHM system design for aircraft maintenance. In total, our contribution to the community is best seen from a practitioner’s perspective. We aim to establish best practices for and contribute to the evolution of OSA-CBM and OSA-EAI. 1. SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT The aerospace industry is a core application domain and development driver for PHM systems. The paradigm shift towards predictive maintenance which PHM systems impose to maintenance and overhaul processes promises higher aircraft availability coupled with lower overall maintenance costs. As in any other domain, challenges in introducing PHM systems to the aerospace domain are twofold. On the one hand, there are individual challenges in developing sensor technology, state detection, and health assessment methodologies/models for determining the future life span of a (possibly deteriorated) component. On the other hand, there are distinct challenges when integrating heterogeneous data from disparate and distributed sources into consolidated information and dependable decision support. This applies at both the aircraft and fleet level. It has therefore been recognized in the community that standardized and open data management solutions are crucial to the success of PHM. Such a standard should introduce a commonly accepted framework for data representation, data communication, and data storage. _____________________ Andreas Loehr et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. European Conference of Prognostics and Health Management Society 2012 2 EADS Deutschland GmbH, Cassidian, is developing a comprehensive simulation framework for research in the areas of condition monitoring and prognostic health management. The framework includes airborne functions hosted on embedded systems, as well as ground-based functions hosted on PC-based systems. The primary objective is to interconnect both airborne and ground-based systems using a uniform data management philosophy and, as far as possible, uniform communication protocols. In this paper, we report on experience from our task to define and implement the data management backbone for such a simulation framework. The backbone is based on the Open System Architecture for Condition-based Maintenance (OSA-CBM) and the Open System Architecture for Enterprise Application Integration (OSA-EAI).