Attaining Program Affordability Through Integration Of Logistical Operations and Health Maintenance

Program affordability needs to be built-in at the initial concept formulation stage. For NASA’s space exploration vision this is critical for long range sustainability of human presence in space. What is often overlooked in the initial concept formulation of a large scale system endeavor such as NASA’s Constellation program is the hidden cost of maintaining requisite operational safety margins and redundancy through adequate supply chain logistics. Ensuring adequate supply chain logistics necessitates the integration of operations and maintenance cycles. What enables this integration is the coordination and reconciliation across multiple equipment types of system health features and logistical information such as: (1) prognostic drivers from Integrated Vehicle Health Monitoring (IVHM) systems producing proactive condition-based "maintain me" demands, (2) maintenance management systems tracking usage and producing scheduled maintenance demands, (3) unscheduled maintenance demands resulting from any trouble reports entered by human observers of conditions missed by the IVHM system, and (4) implicit maintenance demands resulting from mission plans which require assignment of vehicular/robotic assets and consequently require assurance of the assigned assets' fitness for the intended tasks. In this paper we discuss how Coordinated Multi-source Maintenance on Demand (CMMD) technology, which is being is transitioned to the USMC Coherent Analytical Computing Environment (CACE) program and the Joint Strike Fighter Program, can be applied to the NASA domain, and its benefits in terms of mission affordability, operations efficiency and system health effectiveness. Using concepts derived from CMMD, we discuss the kind of IVHM capabilities needed to optimize multiple, parallel, yet inter-linked, operations-maintenance cycles, thereby optimizing program affordability while meeting specific mission supportability requirements across a broad range of mission scenarios.