NeAR Demonstrates Analytics-Driven Capabilities
Lockheed Martin has successfully demonstrated analytics-driven maintenance capabilities compatible with US DoD’s 5G flight-line ecosystem, a critical step toward providing troops with real-time, actionable information to improve aircraft readiness and reduce costs.
The Network-enabled Analytics for Readiness (NeAR) – part of the DoD FutureG Initiative – illustrated how 5G communications technology and advanced analytics minimise the maintenance burden for a variety of aircraft. “This proof of concept demonstrated that our analytics tools are scalable and portable across multiple platforms to improve maintenance […] These intelligent troubleshooting applications are compatible with the future-state 5G.MIL ecosystem,” observed Reeves Valentine, VP of Land and Maritime Solutions at Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems.
NeAR provides maintainers with complete flight data recordings and AI-driven predictive maintenance and sensor-data analytics. “[the] success of NeAR as part of a broader OUSD(R&E) 5G capability will demonstrate 5G enhancements […] while simultaneously enabling experimentation that will identify areas at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam suitable for further research and development in 5G and beyond,” explained Deb Stanislawski, Director of Accelerate Use Prototyping and Experimentation in the OUSD(R&E) FutureG & 5G office.
One such application provides AI-driven cognitive search capability directly to individual maintainers faced with diagnosing aircraft issues in real time. Users can instantly search all historical maintenance records across their entire fleet, to identify similar issues and their resolutions. This information can be extremely valuable for efficient and effective troubleshooting, which minimises aircraft downtime and erroneous maintenance actions.
These demonstrations build on Lockheed Martin’s work to develop a 5G-enabled flight line of the future. Last year, engineers demonstrated that 5G technologies can enable high-speed, secure-data transfer for maintenance analysis. NeAR shows what can be done with the data once captured. This technology leverages multi-access edge computing, which reduces the distance and latency gap between data requests and data delivery.
