Development of a Health and Usage Monitoring Capability for the Australian Army’s vehicle fleets.
Noventus Role
The Australian Army’s ‘Land Engineering Agency’ (LEA) engaged Noventus to ingest, integrate and report upon usage data collected from on-board sensors embedded in Army vehicle platforms.
Business Need
The Australian Army is always seeking better and more efficient ways to sustain their vehicle fleets and maintain operational availability of important platforms and capabilities. A potential avenue for future growth identified was ‘Autonomous Logistic Systems’ (ALS) informed by real vehicle usage data.
In ALS, real data is used to maintain platforms instead of using OEM mandated scheduled maintenance based on fleet wide predictions. As a result, maintenance can be made more efficient because maintenance and servicing can be conducted using ‘Reliability Centred Maintenance’ (RCM).
Army implemented a trial to test the utility of a vehicle Health & Usage Monitoring System (vHUMS) and engaged vehicle platform OEMs to fit sensors into key components for a subset of existing vehicle fleets.
Once data was collected, LEA needed assistance to ingest, interrogate and provide the key information derived from the data to Army’s decision makers in order to better manage vehicle fleets. As this was a trial there were limited resources to build a greenfield solution and existing facilities and enterprise capabilities had to be used where possible.
The Noventus Solution
Noventus’ resources working closely with LEA staff developed a series of ‘Dashboards’ from Army Usage data. This was achieved integrating the newly collected usage data with other data already being collected through Army’s legacy sustainment tools such as MILIS.
The Dashboards were designed for specific Army stakeholders as follows:
- Forces Command Dashboard, giving a Macro view of vehicle fleets indicating the availability of different components of the Army based upon the aggregation of maintenance data related to their vehicle fleets. Where a particular unit or formation fell below certain thresholds of deployable vehicles, the traffic light report would highlight their condition to senior planners
- Fleet Manager’s Dashboard, designed to provide key information relating to the ongoing maintenance and sustainment of a vehicle fleet to sustainment managers
- Artificer Sergeant Major’s (ASM) Dashboard, developed for local Army maintenance managers to track key maintenance data for their allocated portion of the vehicle fleet
