Open Systems Architecture Enables Health Management for Next Generation System Monitoring and Maintenance Development Program White Paper

Modern autonomous and manned transportation along with many manufacturing machines rely on computers, sensors, and actuators across a broad range of applications. Computer-controlled systems are used in critical industrial, aircraft, and marine applications. The operational demands and high procurement costs of today's systems in these applications requires a high degree of uptime and high reliability. Unexpected failures are costly to correct at best, at worst, such failures will be catastrophic. In spite of this general need, highly effective, state-of-the-art diagnostic and prognostic systems have not been implemented. Safety-critical and mission-critical systems often employ special purpose, ad hoc and redundant systems to provide marginal to limited protection. The deployment of basic machinery monitoring and diagnostics is limited due to the requirement for application-specific engineering with each system, the lack of standardized data acquisition interfaces, legacy sensors, single use and ad hoc diagnostic algorithms, and limited to non-existing interoperability and expandability standards. Twenty First Century machinery operations will require a 21st century Maintenance Management paradigm.