In the aeronautic industry, the concept of service oriented architectures (SOA) is nowadays widely adopted. Projects are underway to make existing specialised information systems evolve towards this architectural paradigm and the related technology. This evolution can be observed in different areas of this large industry sector, including PLM and design infrastructures for aircraft development, Air traffic management, and aircraft maintenance.

 

In such initiatives, the cost of the migration project is often one the most decisive issues and, in this aspect, the SOA approach offers a flexibility that has convinced many practitioners, especially by not imposing a systematic deep refactoring of the legacy systems that need to be invoked as services.

The SWS approach successfully addresses some shortcomings of the traditional SOA approach but the counterpart is an evolution towards richer service models that may require significantly more transitioning efforts. In this context, the adoption of SWS concepts as the foundation of future service oriented infrastructures will heavily depend of the availability of a comprehensive transitioning support. Methodological guidance and tools should be provided to ease the construction of the required semantic-based representations. Elaborating such an extensive support is the objective of the TAO project.

The case study developed by Dassault Aviation is representative of the needs of aeronautic information systems regarding SOA and semantic technologies. Since the start of the project, the high relevance of the case study has been confirmed by technological trends taken in IT "refoundation" projects initiated in several sectors of aeronautics industry.

Dassault case study is focused on aircraft maintenance. The main objective is to show how maintenance legacy data repositories and business processes can be migrated into a semantic-powered SOA framework with the perspective of improving knowledge reuse, interoperability, service automation and data exchanges automation.

 

 

In the reengineered framework, ontology-based models of technical data and services are exploited to support highly interoperable exchanges between maintenance management systems and to provide standardised knowledge inputs for user mediated semantic annotation of technical publications.

The practical results obtained through exploitation of TAO transitioning support on the aircraft maintenance application are intended to be exploited internally. However, the resulting prototype and best practices do provide a significant showcase that is exploited as a basis for dissemination towards several well-identified targets.

 

From a tactical perspective, promotion of TAO aero case study is directed towards two communities: the broad community of semantic technologies potential adopters and specific aero user groups.

Though specifically focused on a highly specialised domain, the Dassault case study tackles business requirements that are relevant in many domains. Hence, we are undertaking dissemination actions to reach potential adopters in various industries. Semantic web events are good places for such broad audience dissemination.

 

In the aero industry sector, several actions are now underway to promote TAO results in a number of selected potential user groups. Our approach is to practically show how clearly delimited needs from specific user groups can be better addressed using semantic technologies, and more specifically by using transitioning tools from the TAO suite. Typically, formal definition of business standards is a major concern of standardisation bodies. While current formalisations rely on relational models or raw XML, we promote ontologies as a better solution for the formalisation of such standards and show how TAO tools can ease transitioning from the legacy models to ontologies.

 

Two standardisation groups are targeted:

 

• ASD/S1000D Electronic Publication Working Group on new technologies ASD is the aero industry association of Europe that gather 33 national associations representing more than 200 companies. S1000D is a widely used technical specification that defines standards for technical publications and related maintenance technical data.
  Our objective is to practically show the benefits of TAO suite as a support for transitioning such a reference specification within a semantically-enhanced modelling framework.
  Part of this specification is actually redesigned in the TAO case study. Dissemination toward this standardisation group is managed by Dassault ASD members and several technical sessions have been planned during the duration of the project. To widen our audience inside the ASD organisation, extension to S3000L (logistic resources) group will be considered in the near future.

• Standardisation group on harmonisation of maintenance standards - MTDTT (Maintenance Task Data Task Team) The goal of MTDTT is to integrate two major initiatives of maintenance data and processes standardisation : ISO PLCS (Product LifeCycle Support) and ASD specification S1000D/S3000L. This working group is composed of major aerospace companies. Ontologies with their modularisation capabilities may provide a convenient solution for such standard integration problems

Additionally, SOA based solution for specialized information systems is becoming a hot topic in aero industry. Large transitioning initiatives are underway, and particularly in the domain of aircraft maintenance. Most prominent results of the TAO case study are intended to be reused in a large-scale project whose goal will be the development of an extensive SOA infrastructure for aircraft maintenance management.

 

	Paper on ontologies and aero standards presented at ESTC 2007
	ASD S1000D web site
	OASIS Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS) TC

 

Further Materials

 

 

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