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The US military owns and operates many complex electro-mechanical systems that were designed 25-50 years ago. Due to the cost of replacement, these systems may continue to be used for decades to come, well beyond their intended design life. Continued maintenance requires spare parts but the original manufacturers may no longer be around to provide them. A holistic plan is needed to determine optimal strategies for prolonging the life of such legacy systems.
Such a plan must include:
- Deduction of design functions/performance: Documentation about these components may be unavailable, incomplete or in a form not compatible with modern CAD/CAM systems. The functional role and technical specifications need to be deduced from available information and knowledge about the particular type of artifact.
- Determining Interfacing constraints: The entire system cannot be replaced, so the replacement must properly interface with existing parts of the system; the minimum requirements for fitting the replacement part into the legacy system need to be determined by studying the part’s mating and spatial relationships to other parts.
- Extracting part geometry: Depending on the level of documentation different technologies may be needed to extract geometric information (e.g., 2D to 3D drawing conversion, laser or touch scanning of physical parts) and to convert it to digital formats for use in CAD systems.
- Identifying opportunities for technological upgrades: Due to technological obsolescence it may be necessary to upgrade the part to take advantage of technology advances in materials, manufacturing methods, and analysis tools, since these parts were originally designed.
- Formulating the best strategy for re-manufacturing: Would it be best to Reverse Engineer (an exact replica), Re-Engineer (modify design), or entirely Re-Design the legacy sub-system or component?
We refer to these technologies collectively as Legacy Systems Engineering (LSE). Most of the prior and current research work in LSE has focused on: (i) making near exact replicas of legacy parts; (ii) extracting only geometric aspects of legacy parts (not material, precision, or function/structural aspects); (iii) automation of manufacturing planning tasks. We contend that the above are necessary but not sufficient for field deployment of LSE technologies. A new, and holistic, strategy is needed to make LSE technologies economically viable and technically practical.
Although some of the tasks in LSE are similar to those in routine product design and manufacturing, there are some major differences that require new tools and techniques to be developed for LSE. Some of the major factors are as follows:
- LSE is heavily constrained
- LSE requires small production volumes
- Short delivery time
- Limited manufacturing resources on the field
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