Application of the Data Distribution Service for Implementing OSA-CBM Standard

Abstract

As unmanned systems become standard equipment, the ability to monitor and manage system health is not just an enabling technology, but is required in order to meet platform availability and supportability goals. Its unique requirements can affect the selection of hardware, the strategy for collecting and processing data, and the integration of healthrelated information with other subsystems. The Open System Architecture for Condition Based Maintenance (OSA-CBM) is a standard aimed to reduce the development and integration cost of Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) systems and to achieve a higher level of performance that includes totally integrated diagnostics and prognostic capabilities. However, despite the well-known advantages of the approach, there have been a few implementation examples of the standard. In this paper, we discuss the applicability of the data centric publish/subscribe model for the design and development of OSA-CBM systems. Computational power and bandwidth are always the key constraints in IVHM application deployments. The publish/subscribe software model is used to form a fundamental structure of the OSA-CBM software, both module’s internal components and inter-module (middleware) communications. The primary benefit of publish/subscribe interaction style is that it abstracts the message transport from the software components or modules and allows them to be uncoupled. The module can add/change/remove internal components from the internal publish/subscribe data domain, called blackboard, and subscribe to local add/change/remove notification. Module blackboards are to assure scalability and reconfigurable. The resulting OSA-CBM design provides software enabling capability to distribute/reconfigure IVHM data processing algorithms across the hardware platforms to meet the required computation and bandwidth constraints. Moreover, another system potential would be a rapid deployment capability, which a generic OSA-CBM module can be programmed via a process description script change. This frees developers to concentrate on the domain-specific issues of their application. Finally, an example application is presented based on a Machine Fault Simulator Gearbox to illustrate the described aspects.