The BROADEN Project - Grid Computing in Aerospace

By Graham Hesketh (Team Leader - Information Engineering, Strategic Research Centre, Rolls-Royce plc)

ABSTRACT

Launched in January 2005 to run for three years, the BROADEN (Business Resource Optimisation for Aftermarket and Design on Engineering Networks) project has a total value of £3.49 million, half-funded through the UK DTI’s Technology Programme. With a focus on three distinct development arenas – distributed diagnostics for engine health monitoring, high-performance computing for design, and agent-based software development for business modelling – it promises to deliver a highly efficient means of sharing R&D resources between separate cost centres, and other widespread organisational benefits. Exploring the potential gains to be made by integrating grid computing – a secure means of sharing information and applications between remote computers, databases and users that has significant flexibility and efficiency advantages over traditional methods – into an existing corporate environment is expected to deliver important benefits throughout the aerospace and other industries. Two of the commercial partners – EDS and Streamline Computing – are planning to introduce service offerings based on the lessons learned, while the universities and other commercial partners involved will be looking to exploit their key technologies more widely. Rolls-Royce is the lead partner in the project, with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), Lost Wax Media Ltd, Streamline Computing, Oxford Biosignals Ltd, Cybula Ltd, and the universities of Leeds, Oxford, Sheffield and York.

A key focus of the project was to deliver an implementation of DAME (Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment, an UK e-Science pilot project launched in 2002) within Rolls-Royce – but this was not its only objective. A second was to enable optimised engine design by delivering the high-performance computing necessary for extremely complex scenario simulations. And third, it was to help drive logistics and supply chain software development by modeling on a large scale the very important and complex demands of Rolls-Royce’s global aftermarket. At an organisational level, it was also seen as an opportunity to integrate the grid-based approach with the cluster computing services model already in use within Rolls-Royce. This will enable web/grid services to co-exist with other middleware on the same infrastructure, allowing greater efficiency and flexibility throughout the business through to production level. With the grid approach to enterprise computing widely seen as the future for global organisations, BROADEN is expected to drive valuable technology and process developments for Rolls-Royce, and UK industry as a whole.

BIODATA

Graham received a First Class Honours degree in Physics and Physical Electronics from Bath University in 1979. He then spent 18 years with AEA Technology (formerly the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority) at their Harwell Laboratories, working on software development for image processing in NDT applications. In 1989 he joined the newly formed Applied Neuro-computing Centre at Harwell to research neural network techniques for dimensionality reduction, visualization and condition monitoring. His major project in the latter years at AEA was a dynamic signature verification system called “CounterMatch”. In 1997 he joined the Computational Intelligence team at Rolls-Royce and began working on data fusion applications for Engine Health Monitoring. His current research interests are based around robust intelligent systems, in particular agent-based methods and distributed grid computing solutions. He is Team Leader for Information Engineering, Chairman of the Natural Computing Applications Forum (NCAF) and project leader for the BROADEN collaborative research program.