Advanced Diagnostics and Prognostics Systems for Autonomous Vehicles

NCMS Project #: 142047

Problem: The biggest challenge to advancing diagnostics and prognostics in ground vehicles is that typically the vehicle design is established without considering sustainment capabilities.  Sustainment is normally considered as a downstream activity.  While On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) functions are developed as part of the vehicle/subsystem design, the focus is more on the requirements to ensure proper operation (e.g., emissions control) as opposed to maintenance aid.  This approach causes a heavy burden on the vehicle technicians, preventing vehicle dealers and maintenance shops from delivering higher quality of goods and services.

Benefit: By focusing on developing a solution that provides a replicable, standard solution that supports the characterization and integration of health-ready subsystems, this can be used an example of how to optimize the utilization of data from these assets.  It will allow other commercial industries to set up an effective proactive maintenance methodology and to monitor trends and issues to facilitate continuous improvement of those processes and the maintenance process itself which can reduce maintenance costs.

Solution/Approach: Current and future digitally controlled vehicles require a new generation of integrated vehicle health management capability with access to the digital control and process management data.  This will allow technicians to characterize and assess the performance and determine, even predict, the health of the vehicle and its subsystems or components.  This initiative establishes requirements for this next generation Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) system.  The project tasks will serve as a road map for the commercial industry and other services in providing systems to monitor system health, identify system faults and perform real-time prediction of reliability and remaining useful life of electronics-rich systems.

Impact on Warfighter:

• Improve insight into degradation of components 
• Reduce asset downtime and disruption 
• Streamline maintenance processes and efficiencies 
• Decrease costs, inventory and waste 
• Increase warfighter readiness and lethality 

DOD Participation:

• U.S. Army – PM Maneuver Combat Systems
• U.S. Navy (observer)
• U.S. Marine Corps (observer)

Industry Participation:

• Global Strategic Solutions LLC
• Spatial Integrated Systems, Inc.
• NCMS

Benefit Area(s):

• Cost savings
• Maintenance avoidance and reliability
• Safety
• Maintenance management improvement
• Improved readiness
• Reliability improvement

Focus Area:

• Business IT and analytics