ePLM Interoperability ASD Strategic Standardization Group

The ASD vision of through life-cycle interoperability is that ‘All players of the global aerospace value network will be able to share digital information securely throughout the life of the products and services’.

The Aerospace and Defence Industry is characterised by a small number of large prime contractors, a global marketplace, a large global supplier network shared among primes and other industries with an average supplier size of 20-50 employees, long product and service life cycles that far exceed the life of software, equipment and people, continuous innovation in products, processes and services for new capabilities and for regular technology upgrade programmes. In many cases this is also subject to rigorous certification requirements. The consequences from all of these business imperatives across the complex lifecycle is the need to manage design, product and service information throughout the product lifecycle, including rigorous configuration management and the long term retention of information, where the data is ‘created once and used many times’.

These interoperability requirements will become more and more critical in the next years, with the move to “Model-Based” engineering practices, where human operators will not be able anymore to interpret directly product representations.

To face this challenge, the A&D Industries need a coherent standards based approach that allows the secure sharing of data and models, with partners and suppliers across a global support network, supported by collaborative efforts to ensure and validate the implementation of those standards by vendors.

ASD SSG has built an initial set of recommendations that particularly recognises the value of ISO 10303 STEP Application Protocols, and intends to manage and control the development of a coherent "backbone of standards" enabling PLM information interoperability for the Aerospace and Defence Industry.

 This analysis results in the following initial set of recommendations that intends to make these standards the cornerstone of the PLM information interoperability:

1. Strengthen the STEP architecture approach to 1) ensure interoperability between STEP standards and 2) provide unambiguous implementation methods (including for new information technologies, e.g. OSLC).
2. Ensure 3D visualisation format standards used in the industry are consistent with STEP standards
3. Ensure the common data model for the ILS specifications is consistent with STEP AP239.
4. Promote the ASD-AIA ILS suite of specifications and seek to manage coherence with ATA specifications where needed by the industry.
5. Participate in the development, and interoperability testing of the next generation of PDM/PLM web services.
6. Facilitate data interoperability in the Aerospace and Defence Supply Chain and align business process between Supply Chain stakeholders.
7. Supports the setting-up of implementer forums (e.g. PDM implementer forum) to test and validate the implementation of the standards-based solutions.

The ASD SSG intends to implement these recommendations and to control progress. On-going actions are identified in the following table:

Workgroup leader

Emeric Jesson (Thales Global Services)