CTMA Project #: 140352
Problem: The Department of Defense (DoD) spends $40 billion annually on weapon system maintenance with continuing cost growth due to inflation and new acquisitions. These expanding costs create the need for new practices that increase the overall speed and quality of maintenance actions while integrating maintenance, configuration management, and other logistics practices.
The military, private industry and academia are researching advanced diagnostics/telematics and condition-based maintenance as a means to expand field asset-health visibility, increase readiness and operational availability while reducing operating and support costs. According to the Applied Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, “The objective of condition-based maintenance is to accurately detect the current state of mechanical systems and accurately predict systems’ remaining useful lives.” By actively monitoring weapon system health throughout its life-cycle, a Program Manager (PM) can use both diagnostic and prognostic tools to help attain the DoD goal of weapon system sustainment (managed by the PM) to meet warfighters’ performance requirements. Adding to this sentiment Ken Johnson from Delphi Corporation, a world leading integrated systems supplier of sensors and diagnostics technologies, stated “remote, real-time condition sensors that provide both field specific, and macro-trend system data along with case-based data capture and telematics, has been an actively pursued solution in the commercial transportation sector for over 20 years. This project will combine the state-of-the-art approach in this field to a critical military legacy vehicle in a dynamic collaborative program that will serve as a demonstration for all military vehicle platforms.”
Benefit: This project will be the first of its’ kind to demonstrate advanced commercial SBT tools on a military vehicle and will yield significant benefits. It is desired that the development of this system would be replicated economically across multiple legacy weapon systems throughout the DoD.
Benefits of this CTMA project include:
- The LAV Depot community, the prime benefactor of this effort, would benefit by receiving vehicles for rework using condition based induction that compliments their existing “Inspect and Repair Only as Necessary” (IRON) program.
- More accurate, timely data from sensors would also aid the Depot as they transition from a “one size fits all” statement of work-based business model to a predictive model that facilitates “just-in-time” LAV material inventory control and rework.
- The SBT software package would provide the O-Level and Depot maintainers with proper procedures and process standards typically reducing labor times by 30% or more, which in turn reduces overall support costs.
- Performance measurements include but are not limited to: speed of maintenance actions, accuracy of maintenance actions, overall equipment readiness rates, quantity of remove-and-replace actions, no-evidence-of-failure-rates, etc.
- This project would unite maintenance data and sensor data within an IDE portal environment to permit the initial development of diagnostic and prognostic tools within PM-LAV and both that would reduce overall LAV life-cycle costs and improve operational availability.
- The safety and sensor data collected during this effort can be returned to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to assist with possible platform design improvements.
- This project reduces remove-and-replace actions and no-evidence-of-failure-rates (reduces misdiagnosis and waste of functional components).
- It would reduce troubleshooting, diagnosis, and repair times both at the Depot and within the field to improve overall readiness rates.
- It would allow the PM-LAV to make more accurate predictions about the levels of spares stockpiles.
- This project leverages lessons learned during the development of the USMC/OSD funded PM-LAV IDE pilot program.
- It utilizes best commercial practices and the most sophisticated communications, telematics and sensor technology available today to arm the warfighter with mission critical information in real time.
- This project will continually feed updates to the life-cycle cost reduction plan.
Solution/Approach: This project shall deploy and test new predictive condition-based maintenance methods for the Light Armored Vehicle (LAV) community located at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland and the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Albany, Georgia and Barstow, California. To accomplish this task, a number of new and emerging technologies including diagnostic sensors, knowledge management data accessibility, remote support-based telematics, secure communication, condition based software algorithms, case-based reasoning, browser-based user interfaces and web portal data delivery shall be deployed, tested and integrated with and on legacy weapon systems.
DOD Participation:
- USMC Logistics Base (Albany, GA)
- USMC Logistics Base (Barstow, CA)
- Anniston Army Depot (Anniston, AL)
- U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM), Program Manager’s Office, Light Armored Vehicles, AMSTA-DSA-LV (Warren, MI)
- LAV Technical School (Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD)
- Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division (West Bethesda, MD)
Industry Participation:
- Delphi Corporation
- Cubic Labs
- Portal Dynamics
- Rochester Institute of Technology
- NCMS
