F-35 logistics system to be reinvented....

Design and construction
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 9792
Joined: 19 Dec 2005, 04:14

by Corsair1963 » 15 Jan 2020, 04:33

F-35 logistics system to be reinvented and renamed, official says


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The computer-based logistics system of the F-35 stealth fighter jet made by Lockheed Martin (LMT.N), which has been plagued by delays, will be replaced by another network made by the same company, a Pentagon official said on Tuesday.

The Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) was designed to underpin the F-35 fleet’s daily operations, ranging from mission planning and flight scheduling to repairs and scheduled maintenance, as well as the tracking and ordering of parts.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s chief weapon’s buyer, said ALIS would be replaced with Lockheed Martin’s Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN), which will be streamlined for efficiency “with the voice of the maintainer and the pilots at the forefront of the requirements list.”

Lord told Reuters outside a closed-door briefing to U.S. Congress that Lockheed Martin, the F-35’s prime contractor, would work on ODIN under the current ALIS funding profile without additional cost to the taxpayer.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) had estimated that ALIS would have cost more than $16.7 billion over its multi-decade “life cycle”.

ALIS was blamed for delaying aircraft maintenance, one of the very things it was meant to facilitate.

“One Air Force unit estimated that it spent the equivalent of more than 45,000 hours per year performing additional tasks and manual workarounds because ALIS was not functioning as needed,” the GAO said in a November report.

By December 2022, ODIN will have replaced ALIS in all F-35s except those deployed remotely or on ships, Lord said.

John Garamendi (D-CA), Chair of the House Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee, called two years “a very tight time frame.”

“We cannot wait until there is a functioning ODIN to work on the other sustainment issues with the jet,” he said in an interview after Tuesday’s hearing. The F-35 has drawn criticism for having a higher than hoped for cost per flying hour.

ODIN will be based in the cloud and designed to deliver data in near real time on aircraft and system performance under heightened cyber security provisions, Lord said.

“We have heard our maintainers on the flight lines loud and clear when they say they want to spend less time on administrative maintenance on ALIS,” she said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... u3gOUr-Dws


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 28404
Joined: 05 May 2009, 21:31
Location: Australia

by spazsinbad » 15 Jan 2020, 06:03

'Dragon029' had a link to the same article earlier: viewtopic.php?f=58&t=13143&p=433113&hilit=ODIN#p433113


Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 9792
Joined: 19 Dec 2005, 04:14

by Corsair1963 » 15 Jan 2020, 06:13

I saw that but decided it deserved a thread of it's own...


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 28404
Joined: 05 May 2009, 21:31
Location: Australia

by spazsinbad » 15 Jan 2020, 06:29

Why not say that then?


Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 9792
Joined: 19 Dec 2005, 04:14

by Corsair1963 » 15 Jan 2020, 06:52

Didn't think I really needed too........ :|


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 28404
Joined: 05 May 2009, 21:31
Location: Australia

by spazsinbad » 15 Jan 2020, 08:25

Out of respect to the first poster I think you need to acknowledge the first post - I agree the topic needs own thread.


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 28404
Joined: 05 May 2009, 21:31
Location: Australia

by spazsinbad » 15 Jan 2020, 15:47

A new artificial intelligence contract to keep planes flying
15 Jan 2020 Mike Gruss

"The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley outpost awarded a California-based artificial intelligence company a contract worth as much as $95 million for software that predicts when military aircraft will need repairs, a tool that would allow make more aircraft available for missions and could potentially save billions of dollars in maintenance costs.

The deal, announced Jan. 15, is between the Defense Innovation Unit and C3.ai and is expected to run for five years.

In late 2017, just 90 days after first meeting with Department of Defense officials, C3.ai reached a prototype agreement to evaluate and process maintenance records from the E-3 Sentry (AWACS) and to plan for repairs. The deal was later extended for the evaluation to include the C-5 Galaxy and eventually the F-35. That prototype period ended in December. During that period, C3.ai was able to predict about one third of unscheduled maintenance events to subsystems, Defense Department officials said.

“That was a real test of the application to show that it could scale to really any aircraft, not just in the Air Force, but in the Department of Defense,” said Lt. Col. Travis Burton, a product manager at DIU who worked on the prototype....

...The Jan. 15 announcement marks the first time DIU’s artificial intelligence and machine learning group has issued a production contract for an other transaction authority. While the deal explicitly covers military aircraft, federal agencies could also submit task orders to use the software to plan maintenance to their aircraft."

Source: https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-int ... es-flying/


Senior member
Senior member
 
Posts: 264
Joined: 17 Sep 2005, 14:16

by noth » 18 Jan 2020, 23:15

So the DoD has made LM admit ALIS doesn't work most of the time, and they're moving to a new system. That's an improvement, I guess. The critics of the F-35 are making hay as usual, but their preference for the Rafale makes them irrevelant. I am concerned at the lack of cloud capabilities amongst the defence companies. Their infosec people should be running their own, and should have provided this as a solution to the F-35 customers. I hope the codebase wasn't written in something not very portable, for what is a Q&A/support system on the backend. Not portable means tying to one OS or dev environment which later along (this is a program running for 40ish years after all) may be unsupported. Computer history is littered with examples of this (COBOL, VAX/VMS).

I'm also concerned that the ALIS system will still be used on carriers/LHA/LHDs. Maybe this will change later on but if the unreliability continues and LM just shrugs because they've moved the rest to ODIN isn't going to be good. Hopefully ODIN will come a little later (10 years?) to the embarked aircraft.

I admire the idea of bringing a combat aircraft into the modern computer era when it comes to diagnostics (like your automobile) but since this is the first ever time it's not really reassuring on how well they've done so far. The ODIN announcement doesn't reassure me on letting Amazon's Government branch being one of the two providers, because stuff leaks. Inevitably so. Is Amazon's Government cloud connected to the Internet? I bet it is. But at least they're moving forward on a replacement system (presumably taking what works in the codebase and rewriting the rest) and we can look forward to it actually saving man hours instead of using up more of them.


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 28404
Joined: 05 May 2009, 21:31
Location: Australia

by spazsinbad » 19 Jan 2020, 00:59

'noth' said above:
"...I'm also concerned that the ALIS system will still be used on carriers/LHA/LHDs. Maybe this will change later on but if the unreliability continues and LM just shrugs because they've moved the rest to ODIN isn't going to be good. Hopefully ODIN will come a little later (10 years?) to the embarked aircraft...."

Why would ALIS still be used on all flat decks? Is ALIS compatible with ODIN? I don't recall reading that IIRC - perhaps it is.


User avatar
Elite 1K
Elite 1K
 
Posts: 1395
Joined: 22 Dec 2014, 07:13

by Dragon029 » 19 Jan 2020, 01:02

So the DoD has made LM admit ALIS doesn't work most of the time, and they're moving to a new system.

Do keep in mind - ODIN is just a name-change for "Next-Gen ALIS", which was / still is the porting of ALIS's backend to the cloud. This will almost certainly allow for faster updates to ALIS / ODIN bugs, but the programs that make up ALIS will still be the same ones that make up in ODIN.

I'm sure they'll be slipping in some bug-fixes along with the porting effort, but at the same time it's also quite possible that during early days of ODIN those programs will suffer from additional bugs from the back-end change (ie: some annoying UI bug might get fixed, only to be replaced with a new annoying pop-up about being unable to connect to servers).

I'm also concerned that the ALIS system will still be used on carriers/LHA/LHDs. Maybe this will change later on but if the unreliability continues and LM just shrugs because they've moved the rest to ODIN isn't going to be good.

ODIN won't be particularly feasible for remotely deployed units; if your ship needs to enact strict EMCON during wartime, how will the maintainers be able to use their cloud-based applications?

Or (until the US military adopts and matures systems that connect to new upcoming satellite constellations like SpaceX's Starlink), how well will ODIN work on a satellite connection that can only provide perhaps 1-20Mbps up/down to be shared across dozens of maintenance devices in a squadron forward-deployed to an expeditionary airstrip?

You could have it so that manuals / tech pubs, logistics / maintenance data, etc is all cached on a local mass storage system (either in each device, or on a ruggedised memory device that the squadron shares), but even then you're likely to have things like the prognostic health management and diagnostic capabilities of ALIS be limited.

You could turn that shared memory device into a local server to also run those functions, but then you just have ALIS. You don't necessarily get the software updates that may come every couple of weeks, but again, until the US military gets some serious satellite bandwidth via things like Starlink, updating that server might not be feasible.


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 7720
Joined: 24 Sep 2008, 08:55

by popcorn » 19 Jan 2020, 02:09

Dragon029 wrote:

Or (until the US military adopts and matures systems that connect to new upcoming satellite constellations like SpaceX's Starlink), how well will ODIN work on a satellite connection that can only provide perhaps 1-20Mbps up/down to be shared across dozens of maintenance devices in a squadron forward-deployed to an expeditionary airstrip?


From reddit:


Info provided to FCC for the initial testing constellation of 1,600 sats. Per sat max. throughput is roughly 20 Gbps.

So that means, if you as user have 1 Gbps link, your link will be capped at 1 Gbps but same goes for others. You can have 1000 people, each with 1 Gbps link and still be bellow 20 GBps per general usage. Not everyone surf / use / whatever in same time. When you click website, (download data), 99% of the time you read and consume the content, you dont click 100% of the time all the time. For sure, video downloading or whatever will use more data, but you can still manage that. Future satellites will be even faster and will have laser connection between them (First gen, dont have that, as far as I know), so things will only get faster as they learn things.

For example, let's say you watch 4K video from netflix or youtube, you would need 25 Mbps - 20 Gbps is 20.000 Mbps - so if we would use max 1 satellite we could have 800 people watching 4k content in same time. For 1080p you would need 5 Mbps - so that's around 4000 people watching videos in full hd in same time. (This is just aprox, in real life there is bunch of other problems that makes no sense to talk about it now).
"When a fifth-generation fighter meets a fourth-generation fighter—the [latter] dies,”
CSAF Gen. Mark Welsh


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 28404
Joined: 05 May 2009, 21:31
Location: Australia

by spazsinbad » 19 Jan 2020, 02:13

Without checking threads about 'expeditionary ALIS' you'll have to rely on my poor memory for stuff I have no particular interest in remembering. However IIRC threads here about ALIS indicated F-35 aircraft can operate NOT connected to the server back where ever for some time. AIR (as I recall) only initial testing on flat decks was problematic with ALIS because the equipment was LARGE (but being redesigned to be much smaller) whilst 'testing' required connections back to 'test land'.

I'm uploading video so using the internet otherwise becomes SLOWly problematic. <sigh> I'll look offline at what I may have.


User avatar
Elite 1K
Elite 1K
 
Posts: 1395
Joined: 22 Dec 2014, 07:13

by Dragon029 » 19 Jan 2020, 05:42

popcorn wrote:
Dragon029 wrote:

Or (until the US military adopts and matures systems that connect to new upcoming satellite constellations like SpaceX's Starlink), how well will ODIN work on a satellite connection that can only provide perhaps 1-20Mbps up/down to be shared across dozens of maintenance devices in a squadron forward-deployed to an expeditionary airstrip?


From reddit:


Info provided to FCC for the initial testing constellation of 1,600 sats. Per sat max. throughput is roughly 20 Gbps.

So that means, if you as user have 1 Gbps link, your link will be capped at 1 Gbps but same goes for others. You can have 1000 people, each with 1 Gbps link and still be bellow 20 GBps per general usage. Not everyone surf / use / whatever in same time. When you click website, (download data), 99% of the time you read and consume the content, you dont click 100% of the time all the time. For sure, video downloading or whatever will use more data, but you can still manage that. Future satellites will be even faster and will have laser connection between them (First gen, dont have that, as far as I know), so things will only get faster as they learn things.

For example, let's say you watch 4K video from netflix or youtube, you would need 25 Mbps - 20 Gbps is 20.000 Mbps - so if we would use max 1 satellite we could have 800 people watching 4k content in same time. For 1080p you would need 5 Mbps - so that's around 4000 people watching videos in full hd in same time. (This is just aprox, in real life there is bunch of other problems that makes no sense to talk about it now).


The 1600 number is old; SpaceX have been authorised to put up 12,000 satellites and they're currently seeking authorisation to expand that to 42,000 - future revisions of their satellites will surely get throughput upgrades in the future (each individual satellite is only meant to last 5 years before re-entering and burning up [they've taken care to ensure no components will survive re-entry]).

Do keep in mind too that because they're in LEO, something like 70% of the satellites will be over the ocean with very few customers to eat up bandwidth; perfect for the Navy. Squadrons forward deployed may have some more customers to content with, but SpaceX is already working with the Pentagon, so I'm sure they'd be open to having satellites give bandwidth priority to military receivers if the Pentagon is willing to pay a fair amount (for context, building and launching the 12,000 already approved is estimated to only cost SpaceX about $10 billion, so for the cost of launching a single USAF AEHF-5 communications satellite you could get the equivalent of ~1200 Starlink satellites dedicated exclusively for US military use.

spazsinbad wrote:Without checking threads about 'expeditionary ALIS' you'll have to rely on my poor memory for stuff I have no particular interest in remembering. However IIRC threads here about ALIS indicated F-35 aircraft can operate NOT connected to the server back where ever for some time. AIR (as I recall) only initial testing on flat decks was problematic with ALIS because the equipment was LARGE (but being redesigned to be much smaller) whilst 'testing' required connections back to 'test land'.


That's correct Spaz - ALIS is able to operate without phoning home to Texas for something like 30 days (going off memory as well), but that is with a deployable or shipborne ALIS Squadron Operating Unit (SOU; bunch of server racks).

The way I think of ODIN and ALIS is like this:

ALIS is like Microsoft Office 2010; it's a suite of software you can use on a computer, but obviously you have to install it. If you have a lot of computers in your house, that means you have to spend a while going around and installing it on every computer. That's okay when they're installed, but if there's a problem with (eg) Excel 2010 that really bugs you, you have to wait until Microsoft brings out Microsoft Office 2013, and then again you have to spend an hour or two upgrading all your different computers.

ODIN / "Next-Gen ALIS" is like Microsoft Office 365 or Google Suite (with Google Docs, etc). They're essentially the same programs (especially for Office 365), but the way you use them is through your web browser. If Google finds that there's a feature that's annoying users, they can update the program on their servers, and all you have to do to use the new version is just refresh the web page.

Also, while your wife might get annoyed that she can't use Microsoft Word while you upgrade her computer from Office 2010 to 2013, with a cloud-based program it's almost seamless.

Of course, if you have a computer that's brand new (never loaded up a web page before) and you don't have internet access, then you can't use Google Docs, etc. Instead you have to install Office 2019 or whatever off a USB or disk (which in this analogy is the continued use of ALIS).


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 28404
Joined: 05 May 2009, 21:31
Location: Australia

by spazsinbad » 23 Jan 2020, 15:34

F-35 Program Dumps ALIS for ODIN
21 Jan 2020 John A. Tirpak

"The F-35’s problematic Autonomic Information Logistics System, or ALIS, will be replaced by a new system starting later this year, which it is hoped will be more user-friendly, more secure, and less prone to error. It’s also to be re-branded as ODIN, for Operational Data Integrated Network….

...The first “ODIN-enabled” hardware will be delivered to the various F-35 fleets late in 2020, with full operational capability planned by December, 2022, the JPO said, “pending coordination with user deployment schedules.” Some ALIS systems being used on aircraft carriers or with deployed units at that time may not get ODIN until they return….

...ODIN differs from ALIS in being a JPO-led effort “leveraging government and industry partners such as Kessel Run [a USAF software development unit], the 309th Software Engineering Group [at Hill AFB, Utah], Naval Information Warfare Center, Lockheed Martin, and Pratt & Whitney,” F-35 Program Executive Officer Air Force Lt. Gen. Eric Fick said in the JPO statement. ODIN will “leverage the agile software development and delivery practices piloted by Kessel Run and investments by Lockheed Martin” to achieve a high aircraft mission readiness rate and meet operational requirements, he said.

An Air Force software shop charged with improving ALIS system software was named “Mad Hatter,” playing off the homonym of ALIS to Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” character, Alice.

“Poor data quality is the top risk to the performance of the new and next generation system,” the JPO said. “That is why the F-35 JPO has prioritized building a new integrated data environment first, using commercial best practice for data management, well-defined and simplified systems of record, and reliable data quality metrics and tracking.” ODIN will be a “cloud-native system that incorporates a new integrated data environment and a new suite of user-centered applications.”

Switching the enterprise to the new system, the program office asserted, will enable “real-time monitoring of system performance and automated collection of performance information, and seamless management of parts, technical orders, and program performance data.”

The Government Accountability Office published a number of reports faulting ALIS for adding unnecessary man-hours and complexity to the F-35 enterprise, saying in a November, 2019 report that USAF maintainers in just one unit reported “more than 45,000 hours per year performing additional tasks and manual workarounds because ALIS was not functioning” the way it was supposed to.

In early versions, ALIS also proved vulnerable to hacking and data theft, another reason for the overhaul of the system, to meet new cyber security needs…."

Source: https://www.airforcemag.com/f-35-progra ... -for-odin/


User avatar
Elite 5K
Elite 5K
 
Posts: 28404
Joined: 05 May 2009, 21:31
Location: Australia

by spazsinbad » 05 Feb 2020, 05:42

DOT&E unsure if new approaches will fix F-35’s ALIS issues [jeepers 'unsure'? what a copout]
31 Jun 2020 Pat Host

"A Pentagon watchdog [DOTE called 'top weapons tester' in this article (HUH??)] is skeptical that the Pentagon’s F-35 Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) placement, the Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN), will be successful unless it is resourced properly

It is unclear whether the Pentagon's new approaches to fixing the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter's (JSF's) troubled Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) will sufficiently improve the system or if more resources are needed, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester [again HUH?] said in his latest report.... [best read at source]

...ALIS does not efficiently enable sortie generation and aircraft availability as intended. Users continue to lack confidence in ALIS functionality and stability. DOT&E suggests the programme expedite fixes to the electronic equipment logbook data because it is a major ALIS degrader, frequent source of user complaints, and is a big ALIS administrator burden."

Source: https://www.janes.com/article/94038/dot ... lis-issues


Next

Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest