Diagnostics and engine management/numeric database

Aerospace services (IAS) is an aerospace engineering service provider with a customer that develops commercial and military jet engines. Each type of engine has unique maintenance parameters that must be constantly monitored as part of the standard maintenance-tracking plan. Engine data and error codes captured during a flight cycle (from takeoff to landing) are downloaded and stored in a maintenance database that is implemented in Oracle. This data is analyzed for performance and engine health (safety). The design engineers develop a thermodynamic model (also known as the numerics) for each engine model and or application. These Numerics contain the thresholds and ranges that will be used to generate the error conditions. Each engine model requires a different set of Numerics due to differences in operation and possible error conditions that exist between different engine models. These error conditions could be in the form of a scalar, a vector or a matrix. The maintenance engineers must associate the correct Numerics with the engine model and run diagnostic software to analyze the data retrieved, in order to improve performance and detect maintenance issues before they become safety concerns. IAS has developed an elastic oracle database design that collects the customized set of numerics generated by the design engineers so that the software needs only the engine model in order to retrieve the data in the format necessary for the diagnostic analysis. This paper discusses the design of the database used to normalize the numerics data produced from the customer´s design engineers and how this general approach applies to many other applications that could handle different products.