SOA-based Maintenance Analysis of BIT System (Built-in-Test)

Abstract: Build-in test (BIT) is a vital part of modern complex military equipment and systems. This diploma work will explore how the diagnosis and information from the BIT canbe used in Lift- the Swedish Armed Forces' Logistics Management Systems for technical service. BIT can be used both for the analysis of errors and for the assessment when appropriate maintenance should be done. Lift-“Lednings-och Informationssystem för Förnödenhetsförsörjning och Teknisktjänster” (“The management and information systems for consumables supply and Technical Services”), is a logistics system that handles the bulk of defense equipment. The technical service includes support for maintenance of technically complex equipment. Lift consists of a number of large collaborative system and available locally, centrally and internationally. Lift is built to high safety requirements to cope with both secret and open information. This thesis works only with open information. The purpose of the thesis was to investigate and understand the Enterprise Data Integration, Message transformation and interface with military system so that it is possible to capture error report from military equipments to central system automatically. Thesis work consists of two main parts, first an investigation and then a prototype. The investigation should be for a number of representative material systems (such as ships and artillery) examine whether and how the BIT error information can be extracted and transferred to the maintenance system. Along with activities to assess the type of BIT information as is relevant to both error repairing and preventive maintenance. Existing standards in the field need to be identified and compared to needs. Possibly the thesis provide a basis for standardization in this field (PLCS). An equipments system is chosen to make a prototype. The prototype will build a SOA based collection of information from the BIT equipments system to the central IT system - Lift. It covers the chain from the interface of BIT system, collection of autonomous local Lift-computer, transformation of BIT information to common database format adapted for the maintenance analysis, replication to the central Lift-computer and access to the analytics. Technology includes SOA, XML, Java, JMS, 4GL language, Sonic ESB communication bus and the Progress relational database OpenEdge. Investigation and prototyping is done under the Scrum agile development process.