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PHM14 Dialogue Sessions: Debate- Standardization must give way to proprietary innovation?

One of the PHM Society’s objectives is the advancement of PHM as an engineering discipline which includes standards and education. Panels on standards in development and what is needed have been conducted and documented in past annual conferences and a Society forum exists for exchanges: http://www.phmsociety.org/forum/592. SAE International as a Technical Co-sponsor has greatly contributed to these activities.

PHM14 Dialogue Sessions: Debate- Standardization must give way to proprietary innovation?

One of the PHM Society’s objectives is the advancement of PHM as an engineering discipline which includes standards and education. Panels on standards in development and what is needed have been conducted and documented in past annual conferences and a Society forum exists for exchanges: http://www.phmsociety.org/forum/592. SAE International as a Technical Co-sponsor has greatly contributed to these activities.

This year we organized a formal team policy debate to explore the impact of standards on technology development and commercialization across the diverse domains of PHM and identify improvements that may be sector specific:
Resolution: Standardization must give way to proprietary innovation.
Debaters For: Tom Mooney, SOAR Engineering & Nicholas Propes, Global Technology Connection and Against: David Alexander, SAE International & Neil Eklund, Schlumberger
Short biographies are provided in Annex 1.
Results
a) Key Points For (Details in Annex 2)
• Innovation- Attempts to regulate it, control it or standardize kills it.
• You can’t write descriptive standards for processes that are still being developed and attempts to empower committees to create some kind of utopian standard to describe what should be done can lead to major problems.
• Standards are a barrier to innovation, hard to change, punish most innovating companies, retard the development of proprietary solutions, and have 5 – 10 year development cycle.
• Standards don’t work for an immature technology domain there are critical technology gap areas, not enough independent evidence to support standardization, and the technology is continuing to mature through innovation.

b) Key Points Against (Details in Annex 3)
• Innovators need to, at the right stage, come together to define a baseline that will satisfy the key stakeholders – the customers, the end-users and the regulators.
• Standardisation is actually a way of defining consensus approaches to technical topics.
• Standardisation is an enabler of not only implementing innovation but aids the development process.
• Standards will be needed to support the innovation, establish a supply chain, determine an acceptable cost model, integrate and interoperate with systems or platforms, and comply effectively with regulations.
• Standards are applied where there is good consensus, and allow us to move past the uninteresting problems, and get to the innovation.
• Standards allow easy cooperation within and between companies.

c) Audience Opinions
• Need to be careful what you standardize
• Must assess maturity before standardizing
• Improving communications is good but regulating processing techniques may be problematic.

d) Vote on the Resolution
In favour-7, Against-4, Undecided-14

A full report with arguments may b submitted to the IJPHM.

Annex 1: Standards Debate- Short Biographies
Thomas D. Mooney, P.E. is president and CEO of SOAR Engineering LLC – a consulting company specializing in PHM that he founded in 2013. Tom has over 40 years’ experience in the aerospace industry. Prior to SOAR Engineering, he was with GE Aviation for 37 years and Raytheon Company for 5 years. Tom held major roles in the development of PHM capability for GE Aviation. He was a founding member and later chairman of GE Aviation’s Design Board for PHM. Mr. Mooney has a B.S. degree from the University of Massachusetts and an M.S. degree from Northeastern University. He is a registered professional engineer in Massachusetts. He is a member of the PHM Society and the American Helicopter Society. He also serves on the industry advisory panel for Tufts University, Tufts Gordon Institute. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.

Dr. Nicholas Propes is a principal engineer at Global Technology Connection, Inc. (GTC) in Atlanta, GA. He has over 15 years of experience in the area of PHM. While at GTC he has worked on many projects related to diagnostics, prognostics, and fault tolerant control. Some recent application areas include satellite battery degradation mode modeling, unmanned vehicle fault tolerant control, hydraulic system diagnostic and prognostic modeling, and structural PHM. Dr. Propes has a B.S.E. degree from Tulane University, a M.S. degree from The University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, and a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech all in Electrical Engineering. He is a certified associate LabVIEW developer and an IEEE member. His hobbies are drawing and fishing.

David Alexander has been with SAE International and its affiliates for 10 years. In his current role as Senior Coordinator, SAE Aerospace Standards Europe, he is responsible for promoting and supporting the SAE Aerospace Standards program and its constituents in Europe as well as involvement in global strategy and outreach to India, Russia and China. David is the official SAE liaison to the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and also supports standardisation interface with NATO, EDA and national defence ministries, and also provides facilitation services for the International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG). In addition, David is also the global staff lead for SAE standards and related activities for PHM. In this role, he coordinates and supports the work of the SAE IVHM Steering Group, the SAE HM-1 (IVHM), E-32 (EHM), G-11SHM and related standards committees and works directly on SAE’s cooperation with key PHM organisations, notably the PHM Society.

Neil Eklund is the newly minted Chief Data Scientist at Schlumberger. Prior to that, he was at GE research for 12 years, working on a variety of projects in industrial analytics. Dr. Eklund has worked on a wide variety of research projects, from early detection of cataract using intraocular photoluminescence to multi-objective bond portfolio optimization. Most recently, his work has focused on projects related to remote monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics for military and commercial aircraft engines, medical devices, wind turbines, manufacturing systems, ground-based gas turbines, and other platforms. His research interests are primarily in applied machine learning for PHM applications.

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