Ricardo helping US Army improve vehicle readiness

Ricardo Defense announced on 15 October that it is working with the US National Center for Manufacturing Sciences on a collaborative project to demonstrate readiness improvements for the US Army’s tactical wheeled vehicle fleet.

Commencing last month, 30 tactical wheeled vehicles participating in operational training exercises at Fort Irwin, California, are being outfitted with devices that will collect vehicle health, usage and operating data from more than 80 different onboard sensors.

Working in collaboration with the army’s Project Manager Transportation Systems (PM TS) and Army Futures Command (AFC), this data will be provided to the army’s maintainers and engineers in order to help improve the maintenance of ground vehicles.

The objective of the 18-month pilot project, led by PM TS, is to showcase technologies and analytical capabilities that enable predictive maintenance, whereby the vehicle’s condition, configuration and operating history are simultaneously used to predict when failures are likely to occur.

The company says the approach permits more proactive and timely maintenance actions, thus avoiding downtime associated with the vehicle from being taken out of service for repair.

At the core of this effort is the Department of Defense’s strategic initiative known as Condition Based Maintenance Plus (CBM+), which encompasses the enabling technologies, processes and procedures focused on a wide range of weapon systems sustainment improvements. CBM+ supports real-time system sustainment decision-making based on predictive need, rather than set intervals of time.

Ricardo Defense is providing systems architecture, engineering and integration support to ensure that data collected onboard the vehicles is made available not only to the army more efficiently for the performance of maintenance and repair tasks, but also to the AFC engineers for data analysis using high performance computers.