Data Standards

For all major Defence acquisitions, the challenge is to deliver effective and cost-efficient information management to keep projects to schedule, maximise performance of solutions, and minimise both total project cost and risk. Smart Acquisition embodies this, and as the UK MoD begins to apply the principles of ISO 15288 (Systems engineering – System life cycle processes), good information management becomes critical to the integration of through-life systems engineering processes.

In order to obviate the high overhead cost of maintaining Defence and National standards in support of Smart Acquisition, LSC Group has been closely involved in supporting MoD’s adoption of an ISO Standards strategy to exploit international standards, and has demonstrated its capability in information management across a number of disciplines covering a complete spectrum of enabling activities: legacy data conversion, electronic document conversion and creation, asset management of configured items.

STEP, adopted by the UK MoD as the ‘uniform standard for the exchange of electronic product model data’ is a basis for describing product data throughout its life-cycle, independent of any proprietary information system, and was conceived and developed to be an open solution to meet the data exchange challenges faced by the engineering community. STEP has grown in use over the past 20 years to support primarily the exchange of design and manufacturing data between different design systems, and has Application Protocols that specify the contexts in which STEP can be used, for example, Life-cycle, Requirements, Detailed Design, Data Packaging, Analysis, Bill of Materials, Ship Structural Envelopes, Manufacturing Standards, Libraries and Catalogues.

PLCS (Product Life Cycle Support), designated 1S0 10303 AP 239 extends the scope of STEP to address the through-life support issues of complex engineering assets, and from the stakeholder perspective, guarantees that the assured product support information will always be available.