The U.S. Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office is collaborating with industry partners to establish standardized data formats for the whole Air Force fleet through the SAE AS7140 Common Open Data Exchange initiative.
The Air Force Materiel Command said Thursday the initiative involves the Air Force Safety Center and Air Force Test Center along with partners from the private sector, namely, Airbus, Bell, Boeing, Collins Aerospace, EASA, GE Aerospace, Honeywell Aerospace, IEEE, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Meggitt, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Rolls Royce, SAE and Sikorsky.
SAE AS7140 Common Open Data Exchange
The SAE AS7140 CODEX aims to develop three standardized aircraft data file formats and a universal data decoder application programming interface by early 2025. The project also involves the standardization of health and usage monitoring systems, or HUMS, data for modern and selected legacy Air Force platforms.
The file formats include the line replaceable units, or LRU, format used for binary, or BIN, data stored onboard aircraft avionic systems where data is gathered from the aircraft and uploaded into a Department of Defense cloud.
The ground-station format provides a human-readable form of the decoded data, while the third format, called the cloud format, or PARQUET, determines how the cloud data is stored. This format is characterized by its metadata-rich compressed state and supports legacy and modern aircraft.
The standard data decoder API addresses the challenge of data accessibility. It enhances source data access enabling it to decode data from any next-gen LRU or aircraft.
