Digital Data Standards in Aircraft Asset Lifecycle: Current Status and Future Needs

The aerospace ecosystem is a complex system of systems comprising of many stakeholders in exchanging technical, design, development, certification, operational, and maintenance data across the different lifecycle stages of an aircraft from concept, engineering, manufacturing, operations, and maintenance to its disposal. Many standards have been developed to standardize and improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and security of the data transfer processes in the aerospace ecosystem. There are still challenges in data transfer due to the lack of standards in certain areas and lack of awareness and implementation of some standards. G-31 standards committee of SAE International has conducted a study on the available digital data standards in aircraft asset life cycle to understand the current and future landscapes of the needed digital data standards and identify gaps. This technical paper presents the study conducted by the G-31 technical committee. This paper reviews the data being exchanged between various stakeholders in the aerospace asset lifecycle and the availability of standards for the data transfer within the aerospace ecosystem. It identifies gaps based on the list of currently available data standards, and then creates a future landscape to address the needed digital data standards. This paper focuses on aircraft operations, maintenance, transfer, disposal processes, and post-build stage, and does not address the detailed interactions during the aircraft design, development and manufacturing phases. Its scope is also limited to key stakeholder interactions throughout the different stages of the aircraft operations, maintenance, and retirement.