Lifecycle Support for Product Data

NATO seek International Standards

"What's the test voltage for the fifth module?" The question came from a pair of orange overalls, squeezed in behind the cabinet. "What fifth module? There are only four." "It's blue with three connectors." "According to the handbook there's two greens, one silver, and one red. There's no blue one here." "That handbook is about a much use as ???.!" The rest of the sentence was unprintable. "Come on," said the overalls, emerging, "I've had enough for today. Mark it as "Tested" and pack up. It's nearly half past five. If anything goes wrong we can always blame the night shift."

As products grow more complex, and are subject to continuous change, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep the information required for maintenance in line with the changing product. The information needed is also growing rapidly. Configuration data, diagnostic data, failure modes, connection diagrams, assembly drawings, special tools and test equipment, spares details, test requirements - the absence of any of these will stop the work in progress. Or maybe it won't. Which could be even worse!

As owners of complex assets Defence Ministries across NATO have more reasons than most to be concerned with effective maintenance. Working with its industrial partners, NATO is now looking to accelerate the development of international standards that address the information needed for maintenance. "The military has much to be proud of in planning for effective maintenance," says John Dunford, Director of the CALS Office at NATO HQ in Brussels. "Today's standards for logistic information - US MIL Spec 1388, AECMA 1000D & 2000M, UK Def. Stan 00-60 - continue to add value, but they have two serious defects. They duplicate data and they add costs to industry."

"ISO/STEP holds the key to logistic modernisation" says Dunford. "One lesson we've learned is the value of single source data. Providing access, rather than copies, makes change much easier to manage, but there are always problems at interfaces. You have to consider the life cycle and the extended supply chain. The old CALS objective - write once, read many - remains true today."

By the end of the year NATO hopes to have launched a joint initiative with industry, linked to ISO/STEP, to accelerate the development of standards for Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS). PLCS will provide a global agreement on how to define and communicate the information needed to by users to maintain complex products.

"STEP has brought great benefits for design" says Dunford. "Now it is time to help the maintainer. Much of the data needed for maintenance is generated from CAD systems anyway but we need extend the capabilities within STEP to communicate complex configuration and maintenance data consistently through the supply chain, and around the globe." The problem is not unique to the military. It is shared by any assembled product needing maintenance. "NATO governments can make a contribution but we need to work with industrial partners to get these standards right".

Further details of the Product Support Life Cycle initiative can be found on the project web site http://www.pdit.com/lifecycle/. Anyone who wishes to participate can contact the project leaders directly on nco@cals.nato.be or crawf03@ibm.net

EPM teams up with NATECH in army vehicle project

Narvik Technology AS (NATECH) has over 20 years' experience with the production and maintenance of mechanical and electro-mechanical components. Their products have been supplied to the Norwegian Armed Forces and to other international suppliers to the defence industries.

NATECH is the developer of the NATECH P6-300M militarised tracked vehicle, to be used by the Norwegian Army. One of the features claimed for the P6 is its low life-cycle cost. EPM Technology is helping to achieve this by bringing its STEP/EXPRESS expertise to bear on the problem of information management.

Their main task is to instantiate AP 203 Conformance Class 1 with all the essential information about the vehicle. This is done using EDMDeveloperSeat, a com-prehensive package of EXPRESS tools which:-

• defines and maintains the EDM database
• provides for HTML output
• offers SDAI and EDM's extended interface as linkable libraries

The information will also be loaded into the application "InSync" from ISS.

More information is available at http://army-technology.com/contractors/transport/narvik/