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F-35’s Ambitious, New Fleet Management System 16 Sep 2013 Amy Butler : Aviation Week & Space Technology
"...The idea behind ALIS is a single, central fleet-management tool that will allow for truly predictive maintenance. Health data for the worldwide fleet will be collated at a hub in Fort Worth and provide analysts with insight of parts longevity or timing for inspections, for example.
In practice, it is intended to make fleet management easier from the unit to headquarters by allowing commanders a single system through which to view all aspects of the fleet. And Lockheed Martin's ALIS Program Director Mark Perreault says it is intended to make the maintainer's job easier. The F-35 is a data-intensive aircraft, and built into it are diagnostic tools that will alert ALIS based on pre-programmed parameters. This information exchange happens at the aircraft, when an ALIS portable maintenance aid (PMA) or portable classified aid (PCA)—ruggedized laptops used for aircraft management at the squadron level—is plugged into the jet for a download.
This use of digital tracking for fluids replaces use of gauges, says Sharon Parsley, a Lockheed Martin spokeswoman. The company boasts that flight-control-rigging maintenance now takes 5 min. for the F-35, compared to 8-14 hr. on legacy fighters, she adds. This is “something unique in fifth-generation systems,” says Tom Curry, Lockheed Martin's F-35 Director of ALIS, noting that its roots are on the F-22 program.
The use of ALIS also eliminates the need for paper manuals; all of the information is stored in the system and configuration updates are automatically provided.
ALIS is programmed to prioritize parts allocation based on principles agreed upon by all partners in the last Joint Executive Steering Board in March, Mellon explains. The agreement allows for squadrons in wartime operations to be prioritized no matter what nation owns them, he notes.
Each F-35 squadron will have a standard operating unit (SOU), a server on which the unit's data is housed. Each country will have a central point of entry (CPE), which holds all of the data from its fleets. Each country's CPE then transmits data to the single autonomic logistics operating unit (ALOU), which is housed at Lockheed Martin's Forth Worth facility and acts as a global fleet-management storage device. “It is the one place where you can integrate for each service and country information across the fleet,” Mellon says.
The Pentagon plans to field a second ALOU for redundancy...
...One of the complex tasks ahead, however, is to field SOU version 2, which is a more transportable and modular. This is needed to support expeditionary operations, especially those on the ship for Marine Corps initial operational capability (IOC) by the end of 2015...."
F-35?s Ambitious, New Fleet Management System#