Certu Readiness: AI-enabled Maintenance Enhancement

Autonomous Logistics

Maintenance and sustainment readiness depends on getting the right part, container, or asset to the right place at the right time, and knowing where every asset is as the picture changes. Today this planning function consumes large numbers of skilled personnel, takes months to implement, and breaks down under degraded communications, increasing maintenance cycle time and reducing readiness.

Certu Systems has built an AI-driven autonomous logistics intelligence layer that performs this identify-and-manage function without a human planner in the loop. Developed by a team of Carnegie Mellon University electrical and computer engineers led by Dr. Hyong Kim, CMU Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with four decades of AI R&D experience, Certu treats sustainment planning as a constrained optimization problem: it accounts for over one million constraints and replans in minutes as conditions change.

Certu is TRL 9 and operationally deployed, not a prototype. It runs today in continuous commercial production across three continents for 14 customers, processing 5 million orders annually and coordinating more than 7,000 assets simultaneously. At one deployment, a 53-warehouse network operated by ThaiBev, Certu manages 2.17 million orders annually across 4,200-plus trucks and 1.7 million shipments with zero human planners in the tasking loop, cutting a 40-person planning team by 80 percent and producing a 35 percent efficiency gain on multi-drop routing (ThaiBev 2023 Annual Report). Full production was reached in under 60 days, weeks rather than the months or years typical of AI tools that address only isolated silos of the planning problem.

Certu is hardware and platform-agnostic, integrating new asset types or handling platforms through an open API in 30 to 60 days, and is built for degraded, disrupted, intermittent, and limited communications: a local edge rule engine runs on the last confirmed picture and re-syncs on reconnection, directly supporting maintenance operations in contested or austere environments where centralized planning tools fail.

Because the underlying problem, matching assets and materiel to need, sequencing movement, and replanning dynamically, is structurally identical across services, Certu’s architecture is not tied to any platform or weapon system. It applies to Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force and Defense Logistics Agency sustainment operations, from depot-level parts distribution to forward container and cargo handling.

Certu Systems will achieve CMMC Level 2 compliance in February 2027 to support integration with Department of War networks and data-handling requirements. Certu is a commercially successful company with diverse clients across multiple countries. Our company does not need development funding; we need a DOW customer willing to allow us to demonstrate our technology and integrate into existing DOW systems.