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

Abstract

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 hard- and 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 real-time 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.