SBIR-STTR Award

The objective of this project is to research, design, develop, and implement an open architecture that is based on meta models and standards for the federated management of knowledge generated over the lifecycle of weapon systems in the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) process. We begin with five assertions that constrain the PLM process in the Department of Defense. Given these constraints, our research hypothesis is the following: A set of web services can be architected to build on existing web services representations of the PLCS international standard to enable federated access to weapon system technical data across Army sustainment organizations and meet business requirements as delineated in the Army National Architecture. The technical objectives for this Phase I research are: 1. Fully develop the problem space, including a refinement of the constraints. 2. Research the technical literature related to PLM, PLM standards, Web Services (as applied to PLM), multi-platform application server integration, BPM (management & technical), Federated Architecture Alignment , and other areas that may be important in designing a prototype solution, 3. Refine the hypothesis, 4. Develop a requirements definition level model in a modern requirements modeling tool, and 5. Develop the appropriate documentation to support the transition to Phases II and III.

Benefits:
The ultimate goal of the proposed research is to create an enterprise software system that provides the capability to search, retrieve and exchange knowledge in a federated environment, accessing data generated throughout the product lifecycle (concept, technology development, system development, production &deployment and operations and support). This type of system would be a valuable asset to any organization that undertakes long-term product development projects. It could also enhance the performance of any organization that is responsible for overseeing product development undertaken by a third party. The intended initial market for this system is the Department of Defense, specifically the Army Material Command (AMC) as it relates to AMC’s activities in weapons systems development. However, it can be used for any long lifecycle item, whether in-house or third-party. As such, we believe a mature version of this system would also be marketable to several Federal agencies charged with the responsibility of monitoring product development in the private sector. In addition, the solution will apply to commercial endeavors, and would be most appropriate for organizations that manage data across a portfolio of long lifecycle items. Still, we think the military is our most important customer, the customer with the greatest need for such a solution. It is our belief that the size of the potential market for this system will be extensive.

Keywords:
product lifecycle, service-oriented architecture, metamodels, federated architecture

The identified problem relates to the management of product data related to sustainment processes. Current product data management processes for sustainment require multiple, and often manual, steps to execute. The manual processes are error-prone and time-consuming, resulting in inconsistent data being provided to the transactional systems. The product developed will be an enterprise software solution that automates the execution of processes that consumes/generates product data and spans across several IT-systems. Among other features, the product will use state-of-the-art technology such as web services within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and will be able to communicate using the ISO 10303-AP239/PLCS standard, which is becoming a de facto standard for defense product data. Our approach consists of: -Identifying business processes that are a high priority for automation. -Modeling the business processes at a level of granularity that will allow automatic export for orchestration using BPEL. -Identifying the web services needed to enable the identified business processes. -Obtaining access to, building, or simulating the needed web services. -Generating Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) code. -Obtaining Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) files which will become input for the automated process or processes.

Keywords:
Enterprise Systems, Plm, Federated Architecture, Soa, Composite Applications.