Integrating IVHM and asset design

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) describes a set of capabilities that enable effective and efficient maintenance and operation of the target vehicle. It accounts for the collecting of data, conducting analysis, and supporting the decision-making process for sustainment and operation. The design of IVHM systems endeavours to account for all causes of failure in a disciplined, systems engineering, manner. With industry striving to reduce through-life cost, IVHM is a powerful tool to give forewarning of impending failure and hence control over the outcome. Benefits have been realised from this approach across a number of different sectors but, hindering our ability to realise further benefit from this maturing technology, is the fact that IVHM is still treated as added on to the design of the asset, rather than being a sub-system in its own right, fully integrated with the asset design. The elevation and integration of IVHM in this way will enable architectures to be chosen that accommodate health ready sub-systems from the supply chain and design trade-offs to be made, to name but two major benefits. Barriers to IVHM being integrated with the asset design are examined in this paper. The paper presents progress in overcoming them, and suggests potential solutions for those that remain. It addresses the IVHM system design from a systems engineering perspective and the integration with the asset design will be described within an industrial design process

Information Seeking & Documentation as Communication: A Software Engineering Perspective

Effective communication of knowledge is paramount in every software organisation. Essentially, the role of documentation in a software engineering context is to communicate information and knowledge of the system it describes. Unfortunately, the current perception of documentation is that it is outdated, irrelevant and incomplete. Several studies to date have revealed that documentation is unfortunately often far from ideal. Problems tend to be diverse, ranging from incompleteness, to lack of clarity, to inaccuracy, obsolescence, difficulty of access, and lack of availability in local languages. This paper begins with a discussion of information seeking as an appropriate perspective for studying software maintenance activities. To this end, it examines the importance and centrality of documentation in this process. It finally concludes with a discussion on how software documentation practices can be improved to ensure software engineers communicate more effectively via the wide variety of documents that their projects require