Rolls-Royce is confident grid technology will earn its wings

Aeroengine manufacturer Rolls-Royce hopes to use grid computing to help reduce airline flight delays and achieve significant cuts in the cost of engine maintenance.

And thanks to a pioneering University research project, grid technology is set to become a major part of the company's IT strategy.

Rolls-Royce makes 44 per cent of its revenue from maintenance and servicing of its engines in aircraft, ships and power stations.

In the airline industry, the company does not sell engines - it charges for use of the thrust they provide, on a 'power by the hour' basis.

The sooner that engineers can be made aware of problems, the quicker they can be resolved and the longer a plane can spend in the air, earning money for the supplier.

'Our aim is to improve the availability of aircraft,' said Peter Cowley, chief scientist at Rolls-Royce's research and technology division.

'If we can detect the first signs of wear and tear it will give us advance warning of maintenance needs, so we can plan engineering work and avoid flight delays, rather than detecting them when components reach predefined thresholds.'

To tackle the problem, Rolls-Royce is involved in the £3m Distributed Aircraft Maintenance Environment (Dame) project, with the White Rose Consortium of Yorkshire universities, Oxford University, and IT supplier Esteem Systems.

Dame is developing technology to support two areas - collecting real-time engine diagnostics while the plane is in flight, and analysing the vast amounts of information gathered from every one of the thousands of Rolls-Royce engines used around the world.

Existing control systems monitor engine components and report whenever safety thresholds have been exceeded. But there is more value to be gained from understanding what happens before those triggers are reached.

'We want to find out the last time an engine went "bump" and "squeak", when we don't have a field in the database called "bump" or "squeak". We want to know if we have found that condition before, and what happened the last time,' said Cowley.

The first on-plane use of Dame technology will be on Rolls-Royce's next engine, the Trent 900, which will be used on the new double-decker Airbus A380 long-haul jet. The system will use a technique called 'novelty detection' to look for any deviations from the normal behaviour of the engine. More than 1Gb of data will be collected per engine per flight.

The next task comes in using that data to find out what caused the deviation - and this is where grid computing could provide the answer.

To analyse vast databases of engine data, design information and operational details requires huge processing power, but using conventional technology is not efficient or cost-effective enough.

The White Rose Consortium of Leeds, York and Sheffield universities, has built a computing grid using Sun Microsystems servers plus Intel systems running Linux, supplied by Esteem. The grid acts as a single virtual computer, sharing resources and maximising the utilisation of available power. A proof-of-concept system is due to be completed by the end of July, before being demonstrated to Rolls-Royce management in September.

'Engines can cost £10m each - we can't throw one away to test it. If we detect an event, we want to see if it has happened before, understand why it happened and what we did last time,' said Cowley.

'We want to use this project to see what the benefits of linking all the data together could be.'

But the experience of using grid technology for Dame could have far wider implications for Rolls-Royce's use of IT. The company often works on collaborative projects with partners such as Boeing or Airbus. The projects are short-term, with perhaps four or five running at any one time. Grids could play a role in helping set up and re-use IT for each initiative.

'We want to build integrated systems across a partnership, and then unplug and plug-in others for each new project, and perhaps grids can help us do that,' said Cowley.

And with so many possible uses for the technology, its potential has become a high-level business issue for Rolls-Royce.

'I expect grid computing to have a significant effect on our IT strategy decisions over the next few months,' said Cowley.

Commercial grid services may not be available for another five years or so, but Cowley says the technology will have such importance that it has to be considered today.

'Decisions for now are likely to follow conventional solutions, but we mustn't commit to long-term contracts with suppliers that we can't get out of in four years or so,' he said.

'I expect we will go through the next cycle of computer purchasing - but I hope it will be the last time that we do. The supply of computer power and storage will become a commodity, like thrust from an engine, sold as power by the hour. I can see computing will go that way.'

But Rolls-Royce is not the only company interested in how grids will change the IT industry.

Martin Doxey, chief executive of the White Rose Consortium, says that the experience gained from Dame is attracting wider attention from companies such as Deloitte Consulting and PricewaterhouseCoopers who want to understand how to set up a utility-based computing service - and how to make money from it.

'They see us as developing a new business model,' he said.