Boeing and GE: condition-based maintenance

Boeing and GE Aviation have jointly developed a method to implement condition-based maintenance systems on aircraft. It is called the Open System Architecture for Condition-Based Maintenance (OSA-CBM). This will become an industry standard with the signing of an agreement by the two companies to grant rights for its use to the Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance (MIMOSA) organization. Project managers implementing condition-based maintenance systems must integrate a wide variety of software and hardware components, each one developed to monitor a single supplier’s system such as an engine, hydraulic or braking system. OSA-CBM simplifies this process by specifying a standard architecture and framework to implement condition-based maintenance systems. This standard defines the binary form to implement the open systems architecture for condition-based maintenance.

The aim of condition-based maintenance (CBM) is to maintain the correct equipment at the right time. CBM is based on using real-time data to prioritize and optimize maintenance resources. Observing the state of the system is known as condition monitoring. Such a system will determine the equipment's health, and act only when maintenance is actually necessary.

“The Boeing and GE implementation provides a 10-fold increase in real time performance of the Open System Architecture for Condition Based Maintenance (OSA-CBM) standard, making it practical for embedded health monitoring of aircraft systems,” said John Armendarez, president of Avionics for GE Aviation.

“GE and Boeing have jointly designed and implemented these key system-enabling technologies under shared funding,” said Peter Lawrence, Boeing Research & Technology director of Support Services. “This architecture allows aircraft and major-aircraft-system manufacturers to economically design and deliver health management capability within their fleets. The OSA-CBM framework provides a standard for systems to share health information, and the new binary implementation delivers this efficiently.”