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The US defence budget is notoriously large. Still, the resources for each department within the military have a limit and need to be managed wisely. For the US Naval Air Systems Command (NavAir), big data, and the ability to process and use it, has offered a way to optimize the use of its resources.

Technology has changed the way asset management has traditionally been viewed by the Navy, says Chris Hammond, a commander at NavAir and deputy manager for NavAir program Deckplate (Decision Knowledge Programming for Logistics Analysis and Technical Evaluation). Deckplate is a Teradata-based data warehousing system NavAir put in to centralize and streamline the way it manages its fleet of aircraft and aircraft carriers deployed around the world.

Hammond spoke about Deckplate at an October Teradata partner conference with Lisa Clark, senior VP of Spalding Consulting. NavAir has retained Spalding for logistics support at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, where Deckplate lives.

A large but agile fleet

About 50,000 Navy personnel are deployed at any one time, Hammond says. Its fleet counts about 11 aircraft carriers, most of them nuclear-propulsion vessels that stay out at sea for extended periods of time without refuelling. Deckplate is used to manage this fleet during both military and humanitarian missions. The Navy normally leads the charge on US humanitarian missions because of its ability to dispatch resources anywhere in the world quickly, Hammond says.

Aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and about 100 aircraft and 1,000 marines, for example, were at the site of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant left damaged and leaking radiation following the March earthquake and tsunami in Japan within 11 days of the mission’s start. Deckplate was used to determine readiness of the fleet operating in the area. The system also provided real-time data on the danger of radiation exposure by the Navy’s assets during this time.

Enterprise-wide visibility

The system uses about 23 years of trend analysis of aircraft readiness. Deckplate data subjects include flight usage and inventory, aircraft maintenance, configuration baseline management, engine total asset visibility, technical directives and supply cost.

“That’s a lot of data on a lot of aircraft,” Hammond says. The system provides enterprise-wide visibility. “We can see where the assets are. We can see the resources expended. We can tell how many hours we’re flying on a given day. We can tell which airplanes flew every day.”

“If an airplane is not airborne, something else has to give. So we want to make sure that that soldier or airman on the ground has the asset covered.” The system can uncover potential reasons like incorrect recent maintenance, a training issue or a component issue.

It also does daily readiness reporting, a process for messages going out every day from an aircraft carrier deployed at sea about the status of the aircraft it is carrying. Back around 2004, these reports would be correlated monthly, put on a DVD and sent to the commanders to tell them what the readiness status was. Deckplate has made this a live real-time reporting process.

Constant process optimization

NavAir also uses Deckplate for on-going improvements of its processes. A recent Deckplate project is to provide data that will enable the command to address problems pro-actively, before they occur, which the traditional reporting process did not allow for.

The system now provides access to real-time comprehensive measurements across the Naval Aviation Enterprise.

For example, the data can be used to compare supply with demand for components, highlighting: “What’s out there? What got broke? How often was it required and why? Was it a problem deeper in the aircraft that caused that component to fail or was it an inherent problem in that component?” And once the aircraft is landed, it can also project how long it will be out of action.

Changing logistics philosophy

For years, the military wanted 100% of its assets up 100% of the time, Hammond recalls. That was the mantra of the leaders, who said, “You will do this,” to which their staff replied, “Roger that. We’ll do that.” Hammond says that cost the military a lot of money. “We have 10 airplanes sitting on a flight line and you got a flight schedule that only requires four, but when you’re working to fix those other four that are down, you’re spending money you don’t really need to spend.”

So a team, which included Hammond, created an initiative that would optimize the process, and in order to change the goal from having all the assets up all the time, to having the right assets with the right configuration in the right place at the right time.

“I don’t need all 10 airplanes,” he says. “Why am I working to fix all 10 airplanes? Everybody always wants the airplanes fixed, but I don’t have the money. I’ve got airplanes forward-deployed that need that money funnelled to them.”

One of Deckplate’s recent achievements was helping a team managing several thousand F18 aircraft upgrade its engine-tracking system. Lisa Clark of Spalding says the F18 program office asked Spalding to help it with parts tracking for engines as they migrated from a legacy system to a new optimized system. “They were going to be losing visibility of engine life tracking and usage for 2,000 engines,” Clark says.

The 1,200 F18 aircraft make up about 40% of the Navy’s fleet, she says. Several squadrons provide support for these machines and these squadrons were planning to take about two years to migrate the legacy maintenance environment to the optimized one.

“And during that time it’s possible for engines to flow between a legacy squadron and an optimized squadron, and we found out… that they lose visibility into the ‘lifing’ of that engine, so they have to go from this conservative lifing for the engine and costing taxpayers a lot of money because they lose that visibility.”

Lifing is an estimate of the length of the engine’s useful life. This is where the Deckplate team came in. They integrated data between the legacy and the optimized systems, providing access to the full picture of the F18 fleet’s engines.

Bigger data on horizon

Spalding’s currently on-going Deckplate project is something called ‘binning’. “This is where we’re really getting into big data,” Clark says. Rather than looking at what’s happening with the aircraft monthly, the binning project is to look at a history of some 200m maintenance actions, and breaking them down into the exact types of maintenance actions that took place.

“Every 15 minutes of this maintenance action – what would we attribute that 15 minutes to? Were we awaiting maintenance? Were we awaiting supply? How do we get to that fine-grained data to really understand where the bottlenecks are?” Clark explains.

This presents a big problem from an IT perspective, since the amount of data the team is going to be dealing with is going to balloon. They’re starting by looking at the last five years, within which about 5,000 aircraft had some kind of status change.

“We’re looking at all the status messages related to this aircraft – all the maintenance stats associated with this aircraft and the usage,” Clark says. This data is combined and analysed to arrive at the ultimate set of results, which is identifying what exactly time was spent on when the aircraft was in the maintenance status.

To do this, the team is looking at increasing Deckplate’s processing capacity by almost 600%. The timing could not be better because the Teradata systems are due for a refresh. There are currently three Teradata environments, using the company’s massively parallel platform: test, development and production. The environments are running on 15 servers, some of which are virtualized.

During the tech refresh, the test system is going to be replaced with a new one, and processing power of the production system is going to be boosted significantly. The Teradata systems are also going to change from Windows operating system to Linux.

A gradual migration

To stay current, the Deckplate team has a five-year program to incrementally replace NavAir’s legacy systems. Taking the most useful functions of the applications on those systems, improving them and migrating them onto Deckplate.

Systems being migrated include a system that reports where any aircraft is and its status at any given time. The logistics management system is another one being migrated. Deckplate will make it from a static system into a dynamic one. These are only a couple of examples.

As legacy applications are improved and migrated onto the new platform, NavAir becomes more and more effective in supporting the Navy’s missions, ensuring itsstaff around the world have the data they need to do their jobs.

This article first appeared in DatacenterDynamics FOCUS magazine Issue 19. Haven’t seen it? Click here to register to receive it.