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Advanced Asset Tracking
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IATMS Architecture
As demands on military aircraft increase to
meet U.S. commitments at home and
abroad, a little recognized but vital segment
of the support team is also squaring up to the
challenge. The Air Force’s maintenance, repair,
and overhaul (MRO) facilities and personnel—the
service men and women responsible for keeping our aircraft in
the air—are continually striving for more effective and efficient
methods and technologies for maintaining the readiness of
our aircraft fleet.
The Air Force’s Tinker Air Force Base (TAFB), Oklahoma City
Air Logistics Center (OC-ALC) and the Hill Air Force Base
(HAFB), Ogden Air Logistics Center (OO-ALC) are responsible
for the maintenance, repair, and overhaul of billions of dollars
worth of aircraft each year. In addition to the actual nuts
and bolts work on aircraft, a significant undertaking in itself,
MRO activities involve the coordinated planning, scheduling,
and moving of not only the aircraft, but also the thousands of
pieces of ground support equipment (GSE) and other assets
used in MRO work. At Tinker, more than 3500 items, ranging
from huge cranes and air-conditioners to wrenches and drills,
are required for MRO work that is spread over an area the
size of a small city. MRO planning and coordination is a
tightly orchestrated endeavor: aircraft, parts, and GSE
required for each step, large items that can be difficult and
time consuming to stage and deploy, must be in place when
and where they are needed and must accommodate the
requirements of other ongoing MRO work. A lag at any step
in the schedule—the result of movement conflicts or double
scheduled GSE, for example—can have a ripple effect,
impacting other downstream MRO work and leading to
missed deadlines, snowballing cost overruns, and, most significantly, compromised mission readiness.
Crucial to the effective management and coordination of MRO
work is the real-time tracking of the GSE used in those MRO
activities. The inability to track the location of GSE makes it
particularly difficult to stage, deploy, and coordinate MRO
resources for aircraft and GSE movement. KBSI, in an initiative funded by the U.S. Air
Force, has developed an automated system for asset tracking
that, with the help of Ekahau’s powerful Positioning Engine™
(EPE) kit, provides a unified framework for acquiring and
managing geolocation knowledge of GSE both indoors (inside
the MRO shops and hangers) and outdoors (on the aircraft
ramps). The Intelligent Asset Tracking and Management System
(IATMS) provides a
unique software interface that
allows users to track and manage,
in real time, GSE onscreen and to collect
valuable data concerning the movement history of GSE.
IATMS uses detailed background maps of the area under
observation to show the location of tagged GSE. An IATMS
module logs the position of GSE by continuously collecting
data from the attached Wi-Fi tags. The module first connects
to the Ekahau Positioning Engine, extracts current tracking
data, including the x and y co-ordinates of GSE and the current
battery level of the Wi-Fi tags, and stores this data in an
attached Access database. This feature allows users to monitor
the status of the asset tracking tags used to sense and
transmit location information and to track the complete movement
path of a particular GSE over the last week, month,
etc.—data that provides valuable insights into how assets are
being moved and utilized.
Phase II Development
Phase II of the IATMS initiative at OC-ALC focused on hardening and extending the IATMS framework
to include fusion, analysis, and mining of location, asset,
work, and workforce data. The Phase II IATMS framework provides allocation optimization by considering location
information and other data sources that relate to work breakdown
structures, personnel, and schedules.
The success of IATMS at Tinker spurred a pilot implementation
of the system at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. At Hill,
KBSI demonstrated the IATMS capability for round the
clock monitoring of ten selected pieces of GSE using the
bases’ existing 802.11b infrastructure. IATMS also, using
data from the Ekahau Positioning Engine, collects and stores
detailed tracking information, providing rich, summary statistics
on the movement history of targeted GSE.
This material is based upon work supported by the United States Air Force under Contract No. F34601-04-C-0138. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United States Air Force.
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