PLCS Statement of Technical Requirements. Technical Requirements Product Life Cycle Support. Configuration Management, страница 4

The PLCS Initiative seeks to reduce life cycle costs, and improve product availability by improving the quality and accessibility of the technical information needed to support a complex product in operational use.

1.3  Document Objective

This document establishes a Statement of Technical Requirement (STR) for the PLCS Initiative for use by WG3/T8 and the Steering Committee in tasking the Program Manager to do the technical development work. Business issues (costs, benefits, organization, funding etc.) will be addressed elsewhere.

The STR extends the technical baseline established by the PWI Interim Report[1] and will, in time, replace it.

1.4  Document  Structure

The STR presents information at several levels of detail.:

Section 2 defines a context for PLCS, in terms of the types of product to be supported and the characteristics of the business environment that are addressed.

Section 3: establishes the scope of the information to be addresses by the potential standards for the four business areas: The scope for Maintenance, Supply Chain, CM/Change Control and Support Engineering is defined in this section.

Section 4 defines the information content of the proposed standards and their intended method of use.

Section 5 further analyses the business activities to be supported based on the “AP architecture” diagram from earlier work.

Section 6 presents the more detailed information requirements to be addressed by PLCS in the form of English language statements and related graphical presentation. Readers not familiar with the background may wish to read Section 4 first.

2.  INFORMATION SCOPE

The information content of the PLCS standards, and any scope extension, will be set by reference to the prime objective: sustaining operational use.  The AP Content diagram presented in the PWI Interim Report provided an initial scope definition.

The expected information content of each of the four business areas has now been further developed to provide an improved definition of the content of the proposed standards. Key elements from the Core are developed further in Section 5.  An additional heading (Other) has been added to this section, to pick up items not addressed elsewhere.

Further development of the scope is to be expected as the project proceeds. Changes to scope will be approved by the Steering Committee.

The PLCS information scope is further defined as follows:

2.1  Maintenance Information

A first objective for PLCS is to define and structure the information needed to prevent or respond to predictable failures of the physical product instance, in a specified usage scenario.  This information includes:

·  the identification and configuration of the product instance including its physical and functional breakdown;

·  the required product performance, to the level needed for maintenance;

·  failure modes and diagnostic characteristics;

·  relevant usage and operating history;

·  maintenance task descriptions and associated resources (parts, tools, skills and facilities);

·  a sufficient description of the product to support the maintenance activity (e.g. drawings, video clips etc);

·  test and calibration procedures, following product maintenance;

·  information on the return or safe disposal of items no longer required;

Most of this data is generated by the Design and Support Engineering processes.   Information required to model the design process will not be addressed by PLCS.  The modelling of Support Engineering process is addressed in section 3.4.

2.2  Supply Chain Information

Operational availability cannot be sustained without access to appropriate spare parts. PLCS will define the part related information that is relevant to maintenance of the physical product.  This includes: