Maximizing Mission Readiness

CHALLENGE

A leading provider of aerospace and defense solutions wanted to optimize product reliability and help its customers maximize mission readiness. It needed a secure and collaborative way to translate the raw data from its military aircraft into contextualized, actionable knowledge that would enable rapid, robust decision-making while controlling costs.

SOLUTION

The company used data intelligence solutions on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to bring to life the rich store of data gathered by the military aircraft it builds. This secure, scalable and transparent cloud-based solution allows the company to work closely with customers through a virtual twin experience of the product in operation, leveraging artificial intelligence-driven insights.

BENEFITS

The solution makes it possible for the organization to co-develop a suite of digital solutions with its customers and deliver secure, data-driven intelligence when and where it is needed. As a result, the company and its customers can reduce maintenance effort, fix issues faster, optimize fleet management and increase mission readiness.

Navigating Complex Challenges

In the aerospace and defense industry, competitive edge belongs to companies that can develop better, more complex products faster – while keeping costs down across the product life cycle. Mission readiness is critical for customers, so it’s vital to offer products and solutions that help them keep aircraft ready to fly.

This was the challenge set by a leading global provider of defense aircraft that wanted to expand its offer in the in-service domain and use data to drive better decision-making throughout the maintenance and operation phases of the aircraft it builds and loop back improvements in engineering and construction.  

One key goal was to optimize equipment reliability by improving the whole product life cycle, from design and manufacturing to after-sales knowledge. By fully understanding how equipment behaves during a flight, for example, the company could enable predictive maintenance to prevent future failures and optimize aircraft performance. In addition, it was important for the organization to help its customers identify and resolve any issues quickly, while minimizing costly downtime.

A wealth of data, collected from the aircraft that the company builds, is available to support these commitments. But data alone is not enough to drive more efficient ways of working. The company needed a way to translate complex raw data into contextualized real-world knowledge that partners, suppliers and customers could easily understand and act on.

It chose data science solutions on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform from Dassault Systèmes to help it achieve its vision.

Transforming Data into Knowledge and Know-How

Dassault Systèmes has helped many companies in multiple industries – such as automotive – to tackle similar issues. By applying this deep expertise to the aerospace organization’s unique business requirements, it developed an ambitious project to show what could be achieved.

This one focused on four key use cases:

• Integrating and analyzing data from multiple customers to enrich after-sales product knowledge.
• Creating, combining and managing ontologies and data access, to ensure robust data governance.
• Analyzing similarities between different customers’ problems to derive deep insights and quickly identify the best solutions.
• Monitoring system health by using the data science solutions to create algorithms, run and test machine learning models, and analyze their quality.

Each use case was part of a virtual twin experience – a working, virtual model of equipment and processes that is enriched with contextualized data. This is made possible by data science capabilities, which provide ontologies and semantics to elevate raw data from disparate sources and put it in perspective.

This unique technology delivers accessible insights from the perspectives that users need, including flight operations, maintenance costs, or predicted performance based on historical information and real-time data feeds. In doing so, it builds a vital bridge between the virtual world and the real one. 

Intelligent Insights Increase Efficiency

By transforming raw pieces of data into actionable knowledge and know-how, the solution supports important efficiency gains.

Artificial intelligence capabilities are embedded in the 3DEXPERIENCE to help data scientists create algorithms and train machine learning models. By using these capabilities within a technical assistance center, for example, the company can analyze multiple customer problems, calculate their similarities and learn from them. This powerful analytics capability, combined with the virtual twin experience, makes it possible to quickly find the cause of a problem and pinpoint the best solution. AI-enhanced workflow management then helps to resolve the issue quickly.

A Unique, Collaborative Space

Collaboration across the product life cycle is a top priority for the company. Working closely with its customers, suppliers and partners is the only way to maximize efficiency in the maintenance, repair and overhaul of its military aircraft.

Dassault Systèmes is ideally positioned to meet that requirement, because of its ability to deploy a single, unique solution at the cross-company level. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a virtual space where the aircraft manufacturer can work with partners, suppliers and customers on a virtual twin of the product. Integrating data from multiple customers allows users to analyze, refine and share items like maintenance plans, tasks and key performance indicators in a 3D context.

Using the platform, the organization has been able to co-develop digital solutions with its customers. The result is a suite of services that exploits the rich store of data gathered by the company-built military aircraft and helicopters, to deliver data-driven intelligence whenever and wherever it is needed. This has unlocked the power of big data analytics for customers, helping them to reduce maintenance effort, optimize fleet management and increase mission readiness.

Secure Support for Future Growth

Security and confidentiality are crucial for military operators, so it was imperative that the solution should combine trust and transparency with the flexibility to support big data analytics and expedient collaboration. The secure, scalable 3DEXPERIENCE platform, with advanced data science capabilities, makes this possible.

Dassault Systèmes worked with the company to design a solution based on a secure infrastructure that complies with regulations, with limited distribution access for military data. One challenge has been to create a solution that complies with the company’s own IT and security rules, and with the data security and confidentiality requirements of its customers. Stringent protocols have been developed to ensure confidentiality around customer data.

With robust security built in, this scalable architecture allows the company and its customers to harness big data analytics as and when needed. It can share relevant, real-world insights in complete confidence, providing secure access anywhere, at any time and on any device. 

Beyond Data-Only

With this in place, it can evolve its operations to yield ever greater value, amid growing demand for big data analytics to support customers’ operations.

The organization is investing in a business model that bridges its legacy and new programs so it can continue to develop digital services that meet current and future requirements. Plans include constant expansion of the offering with tailored choices – allowing each customer to select the services that will be most effective for them to maximize fleet availability, optimize maintenance and enable rapid, robust decision-making while controlling costs.

Aerospace and defense companies face a major transformation challenge. This is no longer about simply introducing new technology to manage the conflicting objectives of accommodating greater complexity and keeping costs down. Increasingly, companies need to rethink the way the organization operates. By combining advanced data science with the virtual twin experience from Dassault Systèmes, the company can build a bridge between the virtual and real worlds. This transforms raw data into actionable knowledge and know-how, enabling dramatic efficiency gains.

Morgan Zimmermann, CEO of Dassault Systèmes NETVIBES

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