Reuse of Ship Product Model Data for Life-Cycle Support

Abstract

With the advent of full service contracts by the Navy, shipyards have become responsible for the life-cycle support of ships, including maintenance and logistics data over the life of the ship. Hence, it will become increasingly important for shipyards to efficiently integrate acquisition data with life-cycle support products. In particular, the use of an Integrated Data Environment (IDE), mandated for all ACAT1 acquisition programs, serves to collect and configure design, engineering, and production information during acquisition. This information is also required to develop the logistics data for the ship, including technical publications, as well as support life-cycle support systems. The shipyard's cost and performance of these new Navy contracts will depend on the efficient incorporation of this engineering and design information. The Navy and the aerospace domains are moving toward the adoption of a new life-cycle support standard for technical publication: the International Specification for Technical Publications Utilizing a Common Source Database (also known as S1000D). This standard applies to both land- and sea-specific applications, as well as defense and commercial uses. The purpose of the specification was to address the dramatically rising costs of managing life-cycle support information. The specification adopts ISO, CALS, and W3C standards. In fact, it uses Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) AP239, Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS), as one of its normative standards. The Integrated Shipbuilding Environment (ISE) project has published a technical architecture, including XML-based information models, for the sharing of product model data to exchange design, engineering, and production data. The direct use of such data in the population of technical publications could result in significant savings. This paper discusses the requirements and use cases necessary to define the architecture and process to populate portions of the common source database for ship life-cycle support using product model data in ISE format. Specifically, it addresses the issues involved in generating PLCS technical data directly from ISE product model data and populating a database in accordance with the S1000D standard. Both the S1000D standard for interactive technical documentation and AP239 life-cycle support data will be analyzed based on the ISE technical architecture. The integration of the document-centric S1000D standard with the data-centric AP239 and ISE standards is discussed.