Shift5, Inc., an operational technology data and cyber security company, has released an innovative solution for real-time predictive maintenance technology for Department of Defense weapon systems.
By integrating a combined hardware and software product, platform owners and operators will gain visibility into their fleet health status to decrease maintenance costs and increase operational readiness.
Department of Defense weapon systems have many costs contributing to their sustainment, with maintenance comprising a major portion of total ownership cost.
On one side, maintenance leads to inflated costs and removes vehicles from operations unnecessarily; while on the other side of the spectrum, scaling down maintenance activities to reduce costs could lead to unexpected equipment failure, followed by lengthy triage and repair time. In some cases, these unexpected repairs occur in less than ideal environments with very limited access to platform experts and other maintenance resources.
The DoD’s maintenance system operates primarily on time-based or reactive maintenance and is struggling to implement preventive and predictive maintenance technologies. Ultimately, there is a fine balance to achieve when efficiently maintaining fleet operations without increasing costs and down-time for critical missions.
System operators and commanders have a need for a comprehensive analysis of their fleets’ data in real-time to better predict maintenance requirements. By leveraging high-visibility dashboards and intelligent alerting, users are empowered to perform effective predictive maintenance functions and lower the total ownership cost of their DoD weapon systems.
Unlocking Fleet Data with Shift5
Shift5 provides the Department of Defense and other platform owners the ability to unlock previously unrealized platform data to drive increased readiness and decrease programmatic costs.
There is a tremendous amount of weapon system data being generated but there is a lack of solutions on the market to collect and translate this complex data. By utilizing Shift5’s solution, commanders and operators remotely gain access to significantly more mechanical data than what is produced today by existing products, with much greater detail and higher usability.
“Existing fleet assets have outdated digital components that limit the ways DoD customers can interact with their fleet data. This results in operators having to perform menial, error-prone tasks to collect information about their fleets. With real-time, full-take data collection, Shift5 improves their predictive maintenance programs to accelerate diagnosis and reduce maintenance resource requirements.”
– Josh Lospinoso, CEO of Shift5
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The Shift5 product components – Shift5 Intake, Shift5 Engine, and Shift5 Gauge Cluster – can be enhanced and customized to provide data-driven maintenance insights to extend lifetime and operational availability of systems, as well as reduce reliance on manual, in-person, or routine maintenance checks.
Shift5 Intake enables full packet data capture from a wide range of standard serial data bus protocols on both legacy systems and new builds, while Shift5 Engine uses standards-based rules and advanced models to detect and alert on anomalies or upcoming maintenance needs. Shift5 Gauge Cluster is the off-platform dashboarding, search, and analytics platform and serves as the user’s touchpoint into their data.
We apply our software in a single hardware system to collect data across all onboard systems and report it in real time, with flexible dashboards, intelligent alerting, and tailorable features.
Delivering Cyber Resilience for Operational Technology Systems
Operational Technology (OT) systems that leverage Serial Data Buses (SDB), including major DoD weapon systems, require a holistic cyber security solution. Shift5’s single security appliance protects SDB-dependent systems against cyberattacks and enables operators, commanders, maintainers, and incident responders.
The Shift5 technology leverages a layered approach, applying deterministic rules and advanced models for continuous monitoring for unauthorized software and firmware configurations, while detecting anomalies and identifying system vulnerabilities.
The same continuous monitoring and customizable alerts used for cyber resiliency can be extended to predictive maintenance functions on SDB-dependent critical weapons platforms.
Shift5’s cyber security technology:
- Allows commanders to gain insights into fleet mechanical and cyber health status to provide a common operating picture and enhance situational awareness.
- Allows system operators to efficiently conduct mechanical and cyber inspection of systems at scale.
- Identifies and reports mechanical and cyber anomalies quickly, decreasing downtime of critical assets and enabling the detection of enemy non-kinetic operational preparation of the environment.
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