10-Fold Increase in Real-Time Performance Predicted
Boeing and GE Aviation have jointly
developed a simpler method to implement condition-based maintenance
systems on aircraft. It is called the Open System Architecture for
Condition-Based Maintenance (OSA-CBM). The companies involved say
this will become an industry standard with the signing of an
agreement by the two companies to grant rights for its use to the
Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance (MIMOSA)
organization.
“The Boeing and GE implementation provides a 10-fold
increase in real time performance of the Open System Architecture
for Condition Based Maintenance (OSA-CBM) standard, making it
practical for embedded health monitoring of aircraft
systems,” said John Armendarez, president of Avionics for GE
Aviation. “This technology demonstrates a major step forward
in condition-based maintenance for an entire aircraft.”
Project managers implementing condition-based maintenance
systems must integrate a wide variety of software and hardware
components, each one developed to monitor a single supplier’s
system such as an engine, hydraulic or braking system. OSA-CBM
simplifies this process by specifying a standard architecture and
framework to implement condition-based maintenance systems. This
standard defines the binary form to implement the open systems
architecture for condition-based maintenance.
“GE and Boeing have jointly designed and implemented these
key system-enabling technologies under shared funding,” said
Peter Lawrence, Boeing Research & Technology director of
Support Services. “This architecture allows aircraft and
major-aircraft-system manufacturers to economically design and
deliver health management capability within their fleets. The
OSA-CBM framework provides a standard for systems to share health
information, and the new binary implementation delivers this
efficiently.”
Laboratory testing in December 2008
validated the specification’s operation in both embedded and
PC-based environments, across multiple computer operating systems.
The OSA-CBM framework is an important building block to what the
teams have been calling "The Health-Ready Airplane.”
The aim of condition-based maintenance (CBM) is to maintain the
correct equipment at the right time. CBM is based on using
real-time data to prioritize and optimize maintenance resources.
Observing the state of the system is known as condition monitoring.
Such a system will determine the equipment's health, and act only
when maintenance is actually necessary.
Development in recent years has allowed extensive
instrumentation of equipment, and together with better tools for
analyzing condition data, the maintenance personnel of today are
more than ever able to decide when the right time to perform
maintenance on some piece of equipment is. Ideally, CBM will allow
the maintenance personnel to do only the right things, minimizing
spare parts cost, system downtime and time spent on
maintenance.