SBIR-STTR Award

The capability to quickly assess and restore a damaged aircraft to a useful level of combat capability is vital to the United States Air Force. Open Solutions, Inc. proposes to develop a decision support system that makes use of airframe properties (impact location, load factor) and structural failure mode to assist Aircraft Battle Damage Repair (ABDR) teams in this process. This tool will enhance the ABDR team's ability to evaluate battle damage and develop feasible repair options and procedures, especially during war-time. It could also serve as a valuable tool for training. The proposed system will enhance existing ABDR support tools, and provide the ABDR sustainment community an intelligent simulator for analysis. Artificial intelligence and data mining techniques will be employed to mine knowledge from historic data repositories. Structural and dynamic load factors will also be considered. The underlying model will be based on heuristic and probabilistic theories. Historic data will be used to test, verify, and validate the model. This prototype system will also identify application infrastructure delivery issues including deployment communications, and system availability. Phase I will produce a limited prototype system to demonstrate the proof of concept. A more robust prototype will be delivered in Phase II

Many of the engineering tasks necessary for adequate Aircraft Battle Damage Repair Assessment are currently being performed manually. These manual engineering calculations can be arduous, time consuming, and error prone. Periodic turnover of ABDR personnel exacerbates this challenge and highlights the need for a tool that can both assist with the operational aspects of ABDR engineering and act as a training tool for new ABDR engineers. This Phase II project will provide ABDR and other aircraft support engineers with a tool that can assist with numerous tedious calculations required to perform their jobs. This tool is unique inasmuch as it is designed from its inception to work in a deployed environment in support of aircraft battle damage repair engineering. However, it will also prove valuable to anyone performing structural repairs or analysis on aircraft.

Keywords:
Engineering, Abdr, Calculations, Repair, Quality, Savings, Safety, Tool