Evolving the Data Management Backbone: Binary OSA-CBM and Code Generation for OSA-EAI

Abstract

Integrated system health monitoring and management (ISHM) is a field of research and development where both academia and industry is highly focused on. Airbus Defence & Space has recognized that simulation is a key capability for developing ISHM technologies and is therefore in the process of developing a comprehensive simulation framework in that area. 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 Airbus Defence & Space and Linova Software GmbH, an Airbus Defence & Space preferred software provider. 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. The architectures address several challenges in building Prognostic Health Management (PHM) systems, which are commonly composed of disparate and distributed hard- and software components. Therefore, a common challenge to PHM systems is to be confronted with vast amounts of data which are exchanged 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. We will follow up on previous work and report on our experiences from implementing our second generation data management backbone based on binary OSA-CBM transmission. We also aim at implementing a fully OSA-EAI compliant database. We confirmed the general feasibility of OSA-CBM and OSA-EAI by previous work. We have now migrated our data management backbone to the current release of OSA-CBM, which includes a standard binary transportation format. We report on our experience from implementing this format and discuss issues regarding message handling and Meta data overhead. In previous work we used a simplified and stripped-down implementation of OSA-EAI and our current goal was to be fully compliant with the OSA-EAI standard. In order to reach this goal, we have created a code generator which receives OSA-EAI-provided documentation artifacts as input. It produces compileable source code for a Java-based 3-tier OSA-EAI information system. We have identified issues with the OSA-EAI standard regarding completeness and handling, which we discuss, and suggest means for mitigation or enhancements to the standard. 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.