A NASA engineer, alerted to a systems problem on a spacecraft, uses Web-based technology to access real-time data on the system, data that is too bulky to routinely transmit but which is accessible to her through an object-oriented network linked by a buffered data management middleware system. The engineer has access to data from sensors, prognostic and diagnostic algorithms, and maintenance histories. Through rapid and remote interrogation of the full data set, she identifies the problem.

Currently, in aerospace vehicle health management, this rapid problem identification scenario is unattainable. Sensors in both spacecraft and aircraft record vast quantities of data, but limited telemetry bandwidth prevents its transmission and inadequate data storage and management tools prevent its analysis. However, Creare engineers are working to dramatically change this scenario.

Creare’s new technology is an object-oriented, network-based vehicle health monitoring system. Based on our Ring Buffered Network Bus (RBNB®), it also works over bandwidth-limited environments to moving vehicles by configuring remote algorithms that consolidate raw data into relevant health information. The data are organized via Web semantics, in which the meaning of information is conveyed through metadata, or data about data that can be interpreted and acted on by computers. Research and development continue in this exciting area.

Back to Fall 2004 Index