This whitepaper describes the commonly expressed desires of the US military and suppliers regarding ground vehicle diagnostics, prognostics and logistics. These desires are contrasted against a concept of Commercial off-the-Shelf (COTS) Intellectual Property (IP), now termed COTS-IP. The paper is based on the experience of Dana, given our knowledge in both the military electrical systems domain, and in the commercial vehicle and automotive industries.

It has been observed that some military suppliers do not leverage existing technologies to provide a robust low-cost solution. These bespoke designs run into issues of infrastructure, standardization and high development costs. Through observation, Dana noted simularities between the military’s need for diagnostics and prognostics and the existing solutions being used and developed in the commercial vehicle industry.

COTS-IP seeks to harvest the most suitable technologies from the commercial vehicle and automotive domains and apply them with suitable systems engineering for military applications, spefically in tactical wheeled vehicles. The rationality for this approach is intended to improve the time to field of new technologies and reduce costs.

The COTS-IP approach was applied to a specific ground vehicle diagnostics, prognostics and logistics application by applying and adapting a variety of already comercially developed technologies. In some cases, robust improvements and repackaging are required to suitably field these technologies.

Dana specifically addressed the issues for implementing a comprehensive diagnostic and prognostic system onto a military vehicle by comnbining the wealth of experience gained in the commercial environment with its expertise in tactical wheeled vehicles. The scope of the paper is limited to the transmission of the data from the vehicle. No explicit direction is provided as to what post processing should be done with the data once transmitted from the vehicle.

Military Diagnostics Prognostics and Logistics

 

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Dana LLC has been in the United States since 1990. The OpenECU product family (Model-Based development Software Platform) is Dana’s signature product family and by 2019 there were more than 40,000 OpenECU based ECUs on the road in production vehicle applications.

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