BCS Northampton Talk: Digital Aviation – e-enabled Aircraft and Implications

20th November 2018 - Digital Aviation – e-enabled Aircraft and Implications

Presented By: Dr Fan, Ip-Shing

The latest generation of aircraft integrates new Internet of Things(IoT) devices and enhanced information capability which can provide information at great speed and volume. Some of the information is already part of the flight data being generated and captured for flight operations. Some data relates to the health of the aircraft, systems and sub-systems that traditionally is for reliability engineering; and of great interest to fleet engineering and MROs. The massive e-enablement of aircraft subsystems heralds the age of Digital Aviation. Issues could be reported in real-time to airline operations and MRO stations to plan solutions and solve issues as soon as the aircraft lands. Effective exploitation of this information requires the necessary information communication and processing equipment, as well as the human skills to take advantage of the information. This presentation explains the implications of the Connected Aircraft to the airlines, airports, MRO and the aviation stakeholders.

Dr Ip-Shing Fan leads the research of information exploitation in the Cranfield IVHM Centre, part of the Cranfield Digital Aviation team. The Cranfield approach balances the viewpoints of the OEM, asset operators and maintenance providers. Fan focuses on creating business value from the information generated by e-enabled aircraft for the purpose of through life optimisation of asset operations, maintenance and spares logistics. The Cranfield toolset has been developed and tested with use cases from aerospace, maritime, vehicles, as well as land based engineering assets

Room: Creative Hub, Town Hall (Ground Floor Space – the Southernmost end of the building) The University of Northampton, University Drive, Northampton, NN1 5PH.

Location: The University of Northampton, University Drive, Northampton, NN1 5PH. (Sat Nav doesn't work, the suggestion is putting Nunn Mills Road, Northampton, into your Sat Nav)

Parking: The new University campus is very security conscious, so it is suggested that people park nearby. The suggested locations include:

-Bedford Road car park just east of the Nunn Mills Road. 

- Alternatively, Morrison's Car Park (be aware of the parking time limit) and the Multi-Storey near the Theatre both are 5-10min work from the venue. Check on google maps before visiting.

Usual start time of 7:30pm arrive at 7pm.

All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with. Twitter: @scottturneruon

Model-Based Development (MBD)

Welcome to Oyindamola Olajubu who has recently joined the Department of Computing and Immersive Technology, University of Northampton as a PhD researcher on a collaborative project  with GE Aviation Systems on Model-Based software development. A summary of the project can be found below.

Project Description

Model-Based Development (MBD) is seeing widespread adoption in a variety of domains within industry, especially in aviation. Industries around the world are reporting significant benefits from its use. However, the extent to which MBD can be used effectively in the software development lifecycle is unclear.

GE Aviation Systems primarily uses natural language (textual ‘shall’ statements) to express software requirements. These textual statements are often ambiguous, untestable, incorrect, missing detail, etc. Finding this out late in the development lifecycle proves very expensive. To this end, GE Aviation Systems has turned to MBD. They still use textual statements to express software requirements, but they supplement the requirements writing activity with modelling and simulation so that engineers gain a better understanding of the requirements and their faults. The models can then be refined and improved and serve as the Software Design artifacts that are used to auto-generate code. Currently, this means they have to write tests manually to test the design against the requirements. The study will investigate whether they could use models to express requirements and use those models to auto-generate test cases for testing the design model. This would then increase their productivity. To summarise, the research project will study the feasibility of model based tool support to capture requirements and automate requirements based testing.

Supervisors
Dr Suraj Ajit
Dr Mark Johnson
Dr Scott Turner